JOHN KEATS: A
POET OF THE NEW ERA
Dr. R. K. SINGH
If Keats as a nineteenth century poet continues to have lovers and admirers in the twentieth century beyond the shores of England, there must be something more universal, more vital about him than we tend to appreciate: “What more felicity can fall to creature/Than to enjoy delight with liberty.” (Fate of the Butterfuly, Spenser).
What is the end of poetry? Keats answers: that it should be a friend/To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” Elsewhere, he says: “... a poet is a sage;/A humanist, physical to all men.” As a future-looking poet, he gets into certain veins of human life which is still valid and appealing to readers everywhere.
Keats’s practice of poetry was something more than “the luxury of the idle.” In his unsettling emergence as a new poetic voice that the first publication of ‘O solitude...’ marks is hidden a post-Romantic experience of nature both as escape and spectacle; he expresses his desire to escape the city’s “jumbled heap/of murky buildings” as also reveals a pre-Victorian interest in the Scientific objectification of Nature with use of the phrase “Nature’s observatory.” We see (in his 1817 poems) both private and social impulses, an intermingling of nature and culture, a shift in values of the country and the city, and between classes. He imbues Nature with distinct social qualities; the natural world equals escape from urban pressures, and promises leisure, conviviality and friendship.
As Sri Aurobindo notes in ‘The Future Poetry and the Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art’ the appearance of Keats marks a “turning away to a rich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech which prepares us for the lower fullnesses of the intellectual and aesthetic epoch that had to intervene. Sri Aurobindo clubs Shelly with Keats (though with a certain antimony) as “the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era. His astonishing early performance leaves us wondering what might have been the masterpieces of his prime, of which even Hyperion and the Odes are only the unfulfilled promise. His death in the beginning of his powers is the greatest loss ever suffered by human achievement in this field. Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect or almost perfected instrument of his native temperament and genius, but he had not yet found the thing he had to say not yet seen what he was striving to see. All the other high things that interested his great equals, had for him no interest; one god head only he worshipped, the image of divine Beauty, and through this alone he wished to see Truth and by her to achieve spiritual delight and not so much freedom as completeness. And he saw her in three of her four forms, sensuous beauty, imaginative beauty, intellectual and ideal beauty. But it is the first only which he had entirely expressed when his thread was cut short in its beginning; the second he had carried far, but it was not yet full-orbed; towards the third and highest he was only striving, “to philosophise he dared not yet,” but it was from the first the real sense and goal of his genius.”
Further, Sri Aurobindo laments that Keats, the youngest and most gifted of the six great Romantic poets (Wordsworth and Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelly and Keats)” enters the secret temple of ideal Beauty, but has no time to find his way into the deepest mystic sanctuary.” Though Sri Aurobindo appreciates Keats’s “centre of inspiration” he is also aware of him as a “half-foiled singer of the dawn who indeed tried to seek a harmony of Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life, and the Spirit, the five powers in poetry that constitute the ideal spirit of poetry.” It is for this demonstration of “near over-head level of inspiration” that Sri Aurobindo finds Keats endowed with “real spiritual, vision.” In support of his contention, he quotes”... solitary thinking; such as dodge/conception to the very bourne of heaven,/then leave the naked brain” and stresses that “the ‘substance’ of these lines of Keats is of the highest kind and the expression is not easily surpassable, and even as regards the plane of their origin it is above and not below the boundary of the overhead lines.”
Sri Aurobindo praises the English poet for his “power of revelation” and the deeper vision “coated up in something more external and sometimes the poetic intention of decorative beauty, sometimes some other deliberate intention of the poetic mind overlays with the more outward beauty, beauty of image, beauty of thought, beauty of emotion, the deeper intention of the spirit within, so that we have still to look for that beyond the image rather than are seized by it through the image. A high pleasure is there, but still it is not that point where pleasure passes into or is rather drowned in the pure spiritual Ananda, the ecstasy of the creative, poetic revelation.” Keats, who aims at “word magic,” and is much restrained, appeals to him for his “inspired and inevitable speech,” even if he could not write anything on a larger scale that would place him among the greatest creators.
Keat’s poetry was a major influence in the nineteenth century and Sri Aurobindo himself shares some of the characteristics of the period, so much so that he frequently quotes from the English poet or refers to his verses while developing his overhead poetics and discussing rhetorical devices, rhythm, poetic effect, emotional experience, feeling, vision, etc. In fact both the poets are committed to poetic rhythm, to “making the most of all its possibilities of sound.” Both quest for the mysterious beyond Fancy or Imagination – the “divine melodious truth;/ Philosophic numbers smooth;/ Tales and golden histories/of heaven and its mysteries” to quote from Keats’ Ode. Both write with symbols and explore the cause of Man’s grief showing similarities in structure and texture, awareness of the essential bliss and divinity vis-a-vis elements of ignorance (“Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.”)
Both Sri Aurobindo and Keats talk about beauty and truth. Keats writes: “what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” He was certain “of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” Sri Aurobindo says: “The truth which poetry expresses ... some power of revelation of the beauty that is truth and the truth that is beauty into the outer things of life, even into those that are most common, obvious, of daily occurrence.” Like Keats, Sri Aurobindo, too seeks delight with liberty. The spiritual function of art and poetry is to “liberate man into pure delight and to bring beauty into his life;” says Sri Aurobindo in ‘The Future poetry’. As he explains: “Poetry comes into being at the direct call of three powers, inspiration, beauty and delight, and brings them to us and us to them by the magic charm of the inspired rhythmic word.” He explicitly affirms that the aim of poetry is “to embody beauty in the word and give delight.”
To Keats the source of delight is in sensation, rather than in thought (Enright and deCheckers). He declares that “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Sri Aurobindo too believes that “all art has to give us beauty”; beauty is the “concentrated form of delight”, “the intense impression.” He supports Keats “in wishing to make poetry more intimately one with life... in going back to those creative fountains of the spirit’s Ananda from which life is seen and reshaped by the vision that springs from a moved id entity the inmost source of the authentic poet vision.”
But Sri Aurobindo differs from Keats when he emphasized that the mind of the poet processes “and the aspect to which he thrills is the living truth of the form, of the life that inspires it, of the creative thought behind and the supporting movement of the soul and rhythmic harmony of these things revealed to his delight in beauty.” To Sri Aurobindo, the poet’s function is to bring out the beauty and power of the thought, its life and emotion - and make it all one with life. Like Keats, he is sure the moving power of poetry is a passion of beauty and delight; its sustaining power is “the breath of life.” “A poetry which is all thought and no life or a thought which does not constantly keep in touch with and refresh itself form the fountain of life, ... even if it has vision and intellectual beauty, suffers always by lack of fire and body, wants perfection of grasp and does not take full hold on the inner being to seize and uplift as well as sweeten and illumine, as poetry should do and all great poetic writing does.”
To both the poets, beauty is a subtle concept, intoning quality of the mind or imagination and agreeability of experience; it is virtually an aesthesis of poetic art, an attitude in truth expression, in recreating the actuality of life and interpreting reality, in giving out the self-expressive rapture, joy, delight, in nurturing “finest senses” through an innate, revealed word, or awareness of “secret spiritual self.”
Sri Aurobindo says the words ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ are abstract meta-physical terms, to which we give a concrete and emotional value because they are connected in our associations with true and beautiful things of which our senses or our minds are vividly aware.” Elsewhere, he interpretingly writes: “For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only to appear to be utterly beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significances and the absolute utterance.”
Keat’s lines – “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty–that is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”–are memorable for their beauty of rhythm or feeling brought in by the rhythm. His phrase becomes for the poet true in the sense of “spiritual joy of vision, and not in any lower sensuous, intellectual or imaginative seeing.” It becomes a law of our aesthetic knowledge, a philosophy, even if Keats cautions: “To philosophise I dare not yet.” Perhaps, different from the philosopher, who discriminates truth, as Sri Aurobindo notes, “the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done it, his whole work is done.” but Keats knew he was after a greater truth: the truth of life, the truth of Nature. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: “It is this greater truth and its delight and beauty for which he is seeking, beauty which is truth and truth beauty and therefore a joy forever, because it brings us the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities.”
It is perhaps for this reason that towards the end of his life, Keats said in a letter: “I hope I am a little more of a philosopher than I was. Consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb.”