Why John Keats Is Not a Romantic

By David Gosselin

Remembering John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) on his recent death anniversary.

While most professors and critics place John Keats in the same category of poets as Romantics like Lord Byron, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, nothing could be further from the truth.

In a letter to his brother George (September 1819), Keats made the subtle, but crucial distinction between his approach to poetry and that of notable Romantics like Byron:

“You speak of Lord Byron and me – There is this great difference between us.
He describes what he sees – I describe what I imagine – mine is the hardest.”

Romantic poetry largely concerned itself with describing and idealizing the sensual world and its myriad images. However, Keats thought in precisely the opposite manner: the sensual world was a realm of paradoxes, an entry-point through which to confront and wrestle with the greatest questions of human experience. Imagination was not a question of mere imaginary worlds, it was the realm in which Truth could be captured in its purest form, untainted by the folly and prejudice of the ages.

Like his contemporaries, Keats did use the lush and natural imagery of the sensual world as something familiar with which readers could identify, but he did this not simply to keep them in enthralled to the sensual world; his goal was to draw them into a new unfamiliar world – one beyond all sense – the realm of Ideas.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – another great classical poet of the 19th century – articulated the approach in his preface to Prometheus Unbound in the following way:

“The imagery which I have employed will be found . . . to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind; Dante, indeed, more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets . . . were in the habitual use of this power.”

The words and images in poetry are the shadows cast by the “operations of the human mind,” just as Plato spoke of our sense experiences as the shadows cast by an unseen cause, which can be discovered through the paradoxical nature of the shadows cast.

Keats' statement on Byron, a paragon of Romantic poetry, refers to the use of metaphor to communicate what literal words or images cannot, however beautiful and exciting the language might be. It is the response of a sovereign individual, and his choosing to confront the paradoxes of the sensual world as presented by the poet, which allows the reader to discover the poet’s true meaning.

In opposition to this approach was the one championed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron. Their approach was laid out in what has come to be known as the de facto manifesto of the Romantics, the preface to Lyrical Ballads. It is a standard which has continued to shape the way people think about poetry and the way they write it.

In Wordsworth’s own words, he did everything to avoid metaphorical language in order to keep the reader in the company of "flesh and blood":

“The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; […] I have wished to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him.”

We can hear modern day professors harping on the need for "concrete nouns" and the need to “fear abstraction.” We can recognize the insistence on poetry needing to essentially remain in prose-like form.

However, Wordsworth himself admitted the problem with his philosophy, though he had no way of resolving it:

“But, whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt but that the language which it will suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, […] However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering.”

The poet should never hope to communicate anything which the reader cannot already touch, taste, hear, see or smell. We must be kept “in the company of flesh and blood.”

Keats, even at his tender age, saw the fallacy of such thinking, which he wrote about in many of his poems. Take even a light example such as Fancy:

“Where’s the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gazed at? Where 's the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where 's the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where 's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where 's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
Let, then, wingèd Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:”

What is real for the Romantic is what no philosopher or sound thinker can avoid recognizing as the fleeting images of sense experience. However, according to the Romantic conceit, poetry must essentially adhere to the constraints of the “real world.”

As we will see, the ideas expressed by Keats in his poetry - as opposed to that of leading Romantics - are the expression of a fundamentally different universe, one which the Romantics never really inhabited (except on some exceptional occasions). It was only by letting the imagination freely take its flight - the “wingèd Fancy” - that Truth, unhindered by the bias of the senses and the folly of the world, could be captured.

Part I: The Shadow of a Magnitude

"What the imagination seizes as beauty, must be truth."

-Letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817

Keats was a self-conscious actor who saw himself as someone defending the greatest traditions of classical poetry, such as those of Shakespeare, Dante and the ancient Greeks.

For Keats, the world of sense was a world of paradoxes, of passing images whose resolution could only be achieved with a conception which sought to reconcile the seemingly opposing world of sense and reason – through Beauty. Contrary to popular opinion, Keats was not writing to escape the world and its troubles, he wrote in search of and to deal with a more substantial world, one which lurked beneath simple sense perception.

Let us take a closer look at some examples in order to investigate what kind of questions Keats chose to address and how he chose to address them. Take one of his most famous sonnets:

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Keats was inspired to write this sonnet after witnessing a group of classical sculptures known as the “Elgin Marbles,” named after Lord Elgin, who had brought them back from an excursion in Greece.

As in poetry, the art of communicating a metaphorical idea beyond the literal level of the senses was the defining characteristics of Greek classical art.

In sculpture, the question of communicating an idea becomes a question of motion, of creating an ironical organization of action in the sculpture, which allows the sculptor to bring his idea to life. Startled by the apparent movement of something completely still, the viewer’s attention is drawn from the literal domain of sense, into the metaphorical domain of ideas: one see's that the piece is not moving, which begs the question, “what is moving?” The apparent “action” in the visible world becomes the shadow, which brings to light the action of an invisible world.

The incredible effect of these classical works, which stand alive before their viewers despite the thousands of years that have gone by, had a very significant impact on Keats.

“Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud”

In parallel to this, what we have in Keats’ poem on the Elgin Marbles is not a series of literal images meant to excite: Keats uses the images of “Grecian grandeur” and “the rude wasting of old time,” the different worlds they represent, in order to open the door to a new world.

In the first quatrain, the idea of mortality is introduced:

“My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die.”

This initial idea of being overwhelmed by the contemplation of one’s own mortality is carried on into the first line of the second quatrain, but then a sudden shift occurs:

“Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.”

Beginning at line six, a tension is created between the first set of images and the second: “Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep” seems to contradict the initial sentiment of simple pain or despair. Keats calls them a “gentle luxury.”

The metaphor is then furthered by juxtaposing the idea of “Grecian grandeur” with “the rude wasting of old time.”

“Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.”

Through the juxtaposition of the images of classical Greece, its sublime art, and the yet inevitable passing of all that once surrounded it, the tension between the idea of mortality and immortality has been fully developed. Keats has created a great paradox. He concludes with the image of the sun, which lights the world of our senses, as a shadow!

Now, let us take a look at a different kind of poem. “Daffodils” is one of Wordsworth’s most popular pieces. Let’s see if we can identify a difference in approach.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

“Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

“The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:

“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

What is occurring in the poem? The poet is wandering in a field and comes upon “a host of golden daffodils.” What happens then? He proceeds to give a titillating description of their pleasant motion and appearance and all the pretty images that surround it. By the end, the poet reflects on the images of the daffodils and how their memory still fills him with pleasure. Is the poem about anything other than the literal images of daffodils or how they make one feel? Does this poem offer anything better than what one could experience by simply walking into a field of daffodils?

What we see in Wordsworth’s poem is essentially prose written with meter and rhyme, depicting a series of literal images with colorful language used as a way to interest the reader – just as Wordsworth intended. But there is no metaphor, no higher meaning, it is mere description, however nicely executed.

The Romantic reading of Keats’ poetry, which centers on the use of sensual imagery and images of nature, completely misses the point: what matters is how the poet treats his subject. Images in of themselves are meaningless – it is the idea that those images are used to communicate which defines their meaning. They are shadows “drawn from the operations of the human mind.”

Keats’ metaphorical power sets him apart from other poets. He is able to create paradoxes out of the sensual world and use them as a means of generating fundamentally new conceptions, which cannot be grasped through the senses. What must be captured is that idea that has sent all those images into motion. Through the poet’s power to create new metaphors out of the world’s imagery, such ideas become as tangible to the mind as the sensual world is to our senses.

Of course, all this isn’t to say there are no exceptions in the world of Romantic poetry. Wordsworth’s own poems such as the great “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” depart from his own recommendations and stated philosophy. As do those of other leading Romantics. However, in general they refused such “ostentatious” speech and flights of fancy, given they preferred the comforts of “flesh and blood.” Moreover, the Romantic legacy has tended to insist on “flesh and blood” readings, that is, to stick to precise literal descriptions, augmented with colorful language as a means of exciting readers. Poetry was not a place for “abstract ideas.” However, Shakespeare and Keats were full of such instances because they wished to develop the kinds of metaphors that could elevate the reader above the sensual world, and draw them away from the shadows, towards that which breeds them.

Were the Romantics’ standard to have prevailed in past times, we would have never been given a Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Keats.

Given the inevitable realization that no matter how creatively and how skillfully one seeks to play around with and describe the world’s various sights and sounds and experiences, it is only natural that many modern and contemporary poets have resorted to increasingly questionable approaches to keep the interest of readers. From highly stylized language used as means of titillating the reader's senses, novel word choice and descriptions used for the sake of effect, self-referential writing and obscuring meaning in the hopes of appearing profound, an understanding of the use of classical metaphor as championed by Keats and all the immortal poets of the past remains the most fruitful path for poetical and artistic revitalization.

Keats: A “Contemporary” Poet?

Romantics like Wordsworth referred to Keats’ work as “paganism;” Sir Walter Scott considered Keats’ work “Cockney drivel;” Byron, along with the Oxford fellows of that time balked at the idea of a young poet singing of ancient Greece, given Keats did not know ancient Greek himself. The use of imagery such as that of nymphs and dryads, of Pan and Apollo, which hearkened back to the days of ancient Greece, were thought utterly ridiculous and “uncontemporary.” It was the kind of thing which critics today simply dismiss as “dated” or “unconvincing.”