1 - Why Read Keats?

Summary

A powerful modern image of Keats represents him as the very incarnation of the conventionally ‘poetic’. His poetry is often taken to embody a desire to escape from the harsh and unforgiving real world, into an imaginary realm of unchanging perfection and ceaseless pleasure. This is a common view amongst readers new to Keats, and indeed new to poetry, and it is deeply engrained in contemporary popular culture. It derives, ultimately, from a more meditated and informed school of thought, including many academic readers, which sees Keats as a central representative of the Romantic movement, and which thinks of that movement as an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. The argument is that the English Romantic movement in poetry of the early nineteenth century was a reaction against the changes wrought to the forms of personal and social life, and to the environment, by industrialization and its accompanying economic and political upheavals. The Romantic seeks refuge from these pressing realities, in the self, in nature, the imagination, the past; anything is preferable to direct engagement with the real circumstances and issues of contemporary life, riven as that life was by deep domestic social conflict, and by international war. Keats above all the major English Romantics can seem to lend himself to this kind of reading, for it cannot be denied that the bulk of his poetry offers no obvious direct reflection of, or commentary upon, the crises of his times.

In fact Keats can appear at first sight to offer no commentary on anything at all. One of the biggest difficulties for new readers of Keats is to come to an understanding of what his poetry is actually about. Its declared themes – beauty, love, erotic experience, the fleetingness of experience, and the power of art to take experience out of time – are not usually presented in a context of sustained argument, nor are they presented in relationship with Keats's own ordinary social experience. His handling of such themes is, on the contrary, strikingly abstract, which compounds the effect of their inherent abstraction, and this can make his poetry seem preoccupied principally with the desire to embody the ideal, to become the ideal, and thus to make the poetry itself the very form of escape for which the poet seems to yearn.