Abstract
It is the purpose of this thesis to show that John Keats possessed all the essentially Romantic characteristics of Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth, plus his own-restraint. A word, by way of introduction on Romanticism, which stands alone among literary movements in having exercised upon verse and prose an equal and similar, though not identical, transforming power, seems necessary. The heightened imagination and finer sensibility to beauty, from which it sprang, reacted powerfully upon a language rich in unused faculty and neglected tradition. Like every other English version of a great European movement, English Romanticism had its peculiar originality, strength, and limitations; its chief glory lay in the extraordinarily various, intimate, and subtle interpretation of the world's external nature, wonder and romance, which the familiar comradeship of nature generates in the mind of man. The experience and convictions of poets are conditioned by the age in which they live. Having as poets sensitive, receptive, and retentive minds, they have from birth absorbed from influences, environments and currents of ideas of their own times and those just preceding, far more than they are conscious of, or they can measure. The poets of the Romantic age made a sharp break, with the poetry of the age preceding them. Criticism concerns itself chiefly with the difference between poetry before and after 1798. However, the spirit of the eighteenth century ran deeply in the young lives of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in the whole careers of Shelley and Byron.x The poets of English Romanticism had definite limitations, as the following pages will attempt to show. They lacked vision for the world of man, except in certain broad and simple aspects — the patriot, the peasant, the visionary, the child, and understanding of the past, except at certain points on which the spirit of liberty had laid a fiery finger. Yet Keats, one of the great revealing poets of his time, was in some ways many-sided. With Wordsworth's profound veracity, and Coleridge's weird touch, he unites Shelley's passion for and mastery of beauty. "But the beauty he pursued was less visionary, more concrete, definite, quiescent; the beauty, not of energy, but of luxurious repose." Therefore it did not ally itself, as in Shelley, with the passion of freedom; upon Keats then the teaching of the Revolution neither exercised its stimulus nor imposed its limitations.