John Keats’ philosophy

John Keats belongs to the second generation of Romantic poets, and in fact, he is the last poet during the Romantic Age in English literature. In other words, he was the last of the five or six great Romantic poets. He suffered a lot in life, and he died a very early and untimely death. However, he could create some memorable poems that have kept him alive since his death. During his lifetime, he did not get that much success, but after his death, his reputation increased a lot.

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If we take a look at the ideas of Keats or the philosophy of Keats, the first thing that will come to our mind is that he could mixture truth and beauty. We often feel a contradiction between these two things. Often we have the idea that beautiful things are fanciful and often deceitful. However, Keats felt that truth was beauty and beauty was truth and he did not feel any difference between them. This is perhaps a new idea in literature or very few poets touched this idea before him.

If we look at the other Romantic poets, we will find that they were more or less some kind of philosophers along with being poets. However, Keats was not a philosopher, teacher or revolutionist. Rather, he felt himself or presented himself as an artist. As an artist, he enjoyed the beauty of life and the beauty of nature and tried to portray the beauty in his poems. This is another departure from Romantic poetry as William Wordsworth introduced a new philosophy in poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also earned a lot of fame as a philosopher. Lord Byron was considered to be one of the influential philosophers of his time in the whole of Europe and Percy Bysshe Shelley was a revolutionary poet.

The conflict between idealism and realism is a very old conflict in literature. Keats was an idealist, not a realist. His own life was full of miseries and still, he chose to be an idealist. He felt that poetry should present the ideal picture because, in idealism, we try to make ourselves better and higher. However, that does not mean that he was fully an escapist. Yes, he wanted to escape from the suffering and misery of life that he suffered. He was not a rich man and he did not get success in earning money by writing poetry though he was a very highly educated person. However, he wanted to escape from the surface level, not from the deep level in life. Keats had a very conscious mind about his inner being. Sometimes, reading his poems may feel to be very easy to the reader, but these poems contain a deep inner message.

One of the things that made Keats different from Wordsworth was that Wordsworth saw nature to be alive and directly related to human life. Keats also wrote a great deal about the beauty of nature, but he saw nature for nature’s sake and did not try to make a strong relationship between the human mind and nature or human life and nature. However, it does not mean that he neglected nature, but he dealt with nature from a rather objective point of view.

Keats was great in personifying natural elements. His poems often personified nature. He also used classical references from ancient Greece and Rome, which makes him completely different from Wordsworth. Keats was not that interested in the moral influence of nature on human beings. He was more interested in presenting the beauty of nature, and as a result, he was completely different from Wordsworth.

Keats was great when it came to presenting sensual imagery. By reading his poems, the reader can perhaps touch and feel the fragrance and smell of a flower, the sound and music of the stream and the beauty and loveliness of the moon. He was very good and skilled in making a connection with a reader by using very good imagery. Thus, he could make nature alive in a different way than Wordsworth could.

The beauty of nature is not the only beauty in Keats’ poetry and philosophy. The beauty of his thoughts and his ideas and imagery were also beautiful. For this reason, Keats’ philosophy revolved around beauty and truth.