Keats' Attitude Toward Art Revealed in His Poetry

Keats' Attitude Toward Art Revealed in His Poetry

In order to be able to comprehend John Keats attitude toward art it is

highly important to be aware of what he considers art to be. If it’s

true art, it is certainly very beautiful and not heading toward

becoming any worse in the future since “a thing of beauty is a joy for

ever” ( Endymion: A poetic Romance). Art is simply frozen in time.

However, a piece of art can not be taken as wonderful unless it has

been adored by numerous people over a very long period of time. Since

Keats tends to be focused on images, pictures and symbols he pays most

of his attention to paintings, architecture or sculptures. Basically,

he obviously prefers stable physical art he can sense with his eyes

and hands rather than music or dance that simply disappear after the

performance is over. According to what he claims in the poems, true

art can be definitely beneficial to humankind in various ways; it can

also make truly devoted and talented artists very famous. With his

extensive vocabulary and distinctive literary features, John Keats

underlines the facts that art is valuable, oxymoronic, eternal in its

beauty and simultaneously limited because of its timelessness.

Moreover, to show his love and respect toward art, Keats always tries

to use number of images in his poems, which creates a unique

impression.

Art’s role is not only to please us and make our lives more enjoyable,

but also to make us think, since beauty is thought provoking, and

engages our imagination. It can only expose its genuine beauty and you

as an observer and admirer need to make use of your imagination and

try to find out what it ...

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...n poems. For example in the poem “On first looking into Chapman’s

Homer” where he compares reading Homer to discovering Pacific, you as

a reader can actually imagine and understand the way he felt.

Art plays an important role in John Keats’ poetry. In his early stage

of writing (around 1817) he tends to consider art as being simply

overwhelmingly beautiful without any complications, for example in his

poem “From Edymion: A poetic Romance” As time goes on he starts to

realise that art is not that simple it seemed to be and that it’s

actually not completely pure but oxymoronic, as he has described in

the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” But through out his whole writing

period, which was unfortunately very short due to his sudden death, he

remains very passionate about art and never stops using loads of

images in his poems.