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How Keats Is Obsessed With Beauty

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One Must Imagine Keats Happy Keats is obsessed with beauty in his poetry. Keats always creates a a beautiful object out of some mundane and poor existence. Most notably, in “Isabella, or Pot of Basil”, Isabella buries the head of her lost lover, Lorenzo, inside a pot of basil. Keats approaches beauty in a way fundamentally different from Lake Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. For Wordsworth, his poems “will be found to carry with them a purpose” (Norton, 295). Therefore, in Wordsworth’s pomes beauty is secondary, and he exhibits beauty only in order to show the purpose of his poem. For instance, in “Lines Written in Early Spring”, the beauty of Nature described in the first five stanzas only elevates the speaker to a high enough position and hence prepares readers for the revelation of the final stanza “What man has made of man” (Norton, 280). For Keats, it seems that his poems do not have a purpose; if there is one, the purpose can only be Beauty, as Keats discloses in a letter to his brothers, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (Keats, 232). However, curiously Keats likes to break the beautiful object he creates in his poems. For instance, Isabella’s brothers steal her pot of basil; Apollonius exorcises Lamia. In “Eve of St. Agnes”, although the protagonists Madeline and Porphyro escape from the fate of death, the poem still ends with the morbid deaths of Angela and the Beadsman. If Keats’ goal is to

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