Romantic Imagination John Keats

As a new way to criticize the Romantic period, desperate times call for desperate measures and it did through the use of children’s point of view in Romantic poetry. A period of fifty years called Romantic period included the French Revolution, the American Revolution and wars of national independence in Europe. William Blake, one of well known Romantic poets, commented on his society by viewing it through the child’s eyes in the two sets of ‘Songs of innocence and of Experience’. It is said that ignorance is a blessing but not according to William Blake.

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

The intrigue regarding these narratives has spurred me on to delve deeper into the literary scene of the time period. I also have a great interest in a range of poetry, most particularly from the renaissance period to the era of romanticism, in which my favourite poets are William Shakespeare and William Blake. I have been keen to go further than the A-level English specification in my readings, which allows me to develop an independent response and interpretation to the things I read, as such of William Blake who once famously said that ‘the true method of knowledge is experiment’. I have also enjoyed the translated works of Li Bai, who even though was not from the aforementioned periods, still wrote poems that could be considered a parallel of the romanticism period, in particular his poem ‘Alone Looking at the mountain’, and found that even in its shortness it’s meaning is both deep and

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

For as long as it can be remembered people have used multiple forms of literature in order to gain knowledge, entertain, and even express a certain idea. Poetry is in fact one of those forms of literature, and before people began to write it, it was known to be told verbally by many. A person would tell a tale and those who listened would memorize it, what eventually caused poetry to spread around. Still to this day, many come to fall in love with the magic poetry possesses. It is the writer’s decision to either have a specific rhythm to it or just have a simple list of words. This essay argues that poetry is a creative way of expressing one's emotions and that it should be, not only preserved, but celebrated, even by those who have not considered themselves poetry fans in the past.

Romanticism is the active search for expression and understanding, whether scientifically or creatively and the composers of texts are significant in providing insight and understanding of the various perceptions of these individuals. There are countless concepts and ideologies that contribute to the way of thinking that is Romanticism. However, two themes consistent in and central to texts that express Romantic concerns is that of the transcendent world; a world most commonly manifested in the realm of the imagination and within the expression and search for the divinity that links one human being to another and creates individualism between persons. Within my studies I have recognised to a great extent that ways of thinking are represented

Readers of Keats’s story begin to realize that the fear of a young death is a demon that haunts us all. This was Keats’s goal as a romantic writer: to connect with the reader, to portray his ideas in the form of art, and to make the reader see from his point of view. With his use of colorful figurative language, such as repetition, imagery, and personification, Keats accomplishes his goal. The reason that Keats is so successful in painting a clear picture is because he “uses his imagination to write” (King). By writing his poem in the form of a “Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three quatrains” (King), Keats, like any great artist, clearly states the point he is trying to make. Apprehension of a young demise is a plague that haunts us all. In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to be,” Keats takes our hands and reassures us that we are not

They are living in a moment of revolution, of innovation, of speed and steam; and they are longing for returning to past ages where everything seems easier, like the Ancient Rome or Greece. But especially they are going to look for that innocence and purity in their inner souls, in something that everybody has had the pleasure to experience. For the Romantic poets childhood is vital, for they understood that the child has a wider overview of the world given that he has not lost the innocence that characterizes him; there is something magical, pure and divine in a child’s vision of the world and that is what the Romantics are longing

By analysing the structure (shift from external to internal landscape), language (tenses, pronoun), and presentation of the experience of seeing the daffodils, I seek to demonstrate that feelings of the sublime are only evoked when the narrator’s imagination participates in the scene he has internalized in his memory. While the first three stanzas exemplify a merely physical stimulus and response mechanism to nature, the last stanza shows how active poetic imagination enables man to recreate and amplify emotions encountered, thus resulting in feelings of the sublime. Why does the observer not recognise the ‘wealth’ the scene brings in that moment? How does poetic imagination connect the physical eye and the inner eye to allow for sublime, transcendental experience? Hess argues that the poem “depend[s] for [its] power on the narrator’s ability to fix a single, discrete, visually defined moment of experience in his mind, to which he can later return in acts of private memory and imagination” (298). An example of the recapturing of emotions is seen where “gay” (I. 15) is recaptured as “pleasure” (I. 23) at the end. Active imagination, which draws inspiration from memory of the initial encounter, is now a permanent possession that

John Keats was a poet who saw nature as being exhilarating and beautiful. He often drew comparisons between nature and poetry to express his thoughts. In his poems “Bright Star” and “When I have fears,” John Keats uses alliteration and personification to express his emotions towards mortality. In “Bright Star,” he uses these devices to express his desire to be eternal and permanent by comparing them to a star. Similarly, in “When I have Fears,” he uses them to capture his fear of dying before accomplishing greatness in writing and romance. In both poems, he uses alliteration to overcome his fears by realizing the unimportance of eternity and fame. Thus, by using the same poetic devices, he ultimately expresses his fear of the inevitable death

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

John Keats has many memorable and distinct poems. He is well known for his ability to write and adored by many. Ode on Indolence is a poem that can be relatable to its readers due to its idea of how indolence interferes with life’s opportunities, in particular the three mentioned in the poem, love, ambition and poesy. Keats refers to these three figures as “ghosts” (51) therefore insinuating that they once lived, but now they are mere figments of energy and air.

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written through the power of eternity, beauty and truth regardless of existence, as Wordsworth showed likewise. Keats illustrated his poem through love in its sublime. For example, in the first stanza he says, “What wild ecstasy?” (Keats 930). If ecstasy is a huge feeling of

In the description of historiographies and social theories in the longer poems of John Keats, Kathleen Béres Rogers argues in “John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment” that the "sociological drive of [Keats's] poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment” (Rogers, 2012, p. 163). Here Fermanis tried to trace Keats's working both with and against of Enlightenment legacy and in particular of its progressive, linear model of history. Keats's narrative provoked from a savage, feudal society to an emphasis on sensation and feeling. Endymion was indebted much to the Enlightenment and he used his sensitivity in order to sympathize with human suffering. He found his true love, Diana, only after he used this sympathy in order to love a real

Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though