Assignment-103 - John Keats And P.B. Shelley
This Blog is part of an Assignment of sem -1 Paper no. 101 Literature of Romanticism Period Assigned by Dr. Dilip Bard sir Department of English,mkbu. In this assignment I am dealing with the topic of John Keats And P.B. Shelley
Personal Information:
Name : Kavita N. Chauhan
Roll No. : 17
Enrollment No. : 5108230010
Semester : 1st
Paper No. : 103
Paper Code : 22394
Paper Name : Literature of the Romanticism
Topic : John Keats And P.B. Shelley
Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi,Department of English,MKBU
E-mail : kavitanchauhan2002@gmail.com
John Keats And P.B. Shelley
•Introduction :
Romanticism is not a single coherent aesthetic theory, but rather a general term used to describe a number of attitudes, and ideas, not all of them connected with one Another The Oxford Companion to English Literature- Paul Harvey describes Romanticism as: "a word for which, in connection with literature, there is no generally accepted definition. François Jost supports Harvey: "The multiple meanings of the word romantic are one of the main sources of difficulty in defining the Romantic Movement."
English Romanticism is a literary school which has a theory, based on various fundamental concepts that had great influence on 19th Century English society. It changed rigid traditional concepts and attitudes to more liberal ones. The Romantic Movement began in England in 1798 with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work The Lyrical Ballads.
The Second Generation of Romantic Poet The poets of the second generation, Gorge Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, all had intense but short lives. They lived through the disillusionment of the post revolutionary period, the savage violence of terror and the threatening rise of the Napoleonic Empire. George Gordon Byron was the prototype of the Romantic poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. He was an individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of family, church, marriage and the Christian faith and rebelled against all forms of tyranny. Shelley’s ideas were anarchic and he was considered dangerous by the conservative society of his time. Many of his poems address social and political issues. John Keats had a really brief life. The main theme of his poetry is the conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of beauty, imagination and eternal youth.
1). Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822):
Along with Lord Byron and John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley is among the most respected and admired of the second generation of English Romantic poets. Best known for his extended visionary poems, such as “Queen Mab'' and the “Triumph of Life” and his short verse poems (including “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind”), Shelley is also famous for his once controversial and radical political ideals and his often-proclaimed social idealism. He is perhaps best known, though, as the husband of the novelist Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein, a novel which Percy Shelley is himself now credited with co authoring). While Shelley’s childhood was decidedly happy and rustic, his atheism and radical politics led to his expulsion from college and estrangement from family at an early age.
His personal life was considered rather radical and controversial for his time, especially given his pronounced leftist political ideals and the abandonment of his first wife in favor of a woman named Mary Goodwin, who would become his second wife. Though he began composing and publishing poetry at a young age, Shelley’s career as poet did not truly get underway until he met the English poet Lord Byron in 1816.
This meeting resulted in a life-long friendship between the two that served to inspire and influence some of Shelley’s finest poetry, including his great poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc.” Shelley was also a friend of the poet John Keats, for whom he wrote the elegy poem “Adonis.” Shelley drowned a month before his 30th birthday in a supposed boating accident that many, today, consider to be a possible murder by his political rivals. Today, Shelley is considered by critics and readers to be among the greatest of the second generation of English Romantic poets. Unlike Lord Byron, though, Shelley did not receive full critical and popular recognition until after his death. Several generations of later poets and intellectuals—including, most notably, Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats—were inspired by Shelley’s political and social idealism and radicalism. Shelley is also much admired for his lyrical and psychologically powerful poetry, which offers a striking, visceral style as well as strong messages on behalf of social justice, liberty, and non-violence.
• P. B. Shelley’s view on nature :
Percy Bysshe Shelley is a lover of nature. Love for nature is one of the key-notes of his poetry. His poetry abounds in Nature imagery. Shelley believes that Nature exercises a healing influence on man's personality. He finds solace and comfort in nature and feels a soothing influence on his heart. He treats poetry as a tool for pouring his thoughts to the world. He presents the changing and indefinite moods of Nature e.g. clouds, wind, lightening ,rocks and caves the fury of the storms, waves dancing fast and bright etc.Shelley makes a request to the west wind to make humans beings happy.In his Ode to the West Wind, He appeals:
" Drive my dead thoughts over. the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!"
This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, Goodness and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. So all these natural forces inspired the poet to write the poem.
• As poets of Imagination :
Shelley defended poetry as the expression of imagination and understood as revolutionary creativity, which seriously meant to change the reality of an increasingly material world. However, Shelley’s reality shows itself to be stronger than the ideal and desire, and his world refuses to change. The poet is bound to suffer and isolates himself from the rest of the world, projecting himself into a better future.If the West Wind was Shelley's first convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through metaphors of nature, the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the "harmonious madness" of pure inspiration.
• Shelley’s Philosophy :
P. B. Shelley: Shelley's Platonic leanings are well known. Plato thought that the supreme power in the universe was the Spirit of beauty. Shelley borrowed this conception from Plato and developed it in his metaphysical poem: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Intellectual Beauty is omnipotent and man must worship it.
• As a poet of Classical
The classic writers have created myths by providing nature with the power to do the same deeds and actions that human beings and animals do. Therefore, Shelley does not rely on others‟ creativity totally, but he transcends to create his own myths by following the same procedures of creating their stories. According to him, myth is a fictitious narrative incarnating an idea on natural phenomena. In mythology, the primitives believe that the sun god rides the chariot of the sun from the morning until night. The movement of the sun follows the tracks of dawn and night that vanish after each position the light of the sun reaches. Seasons appear as powerful beings that overcome each other regularly in the year. On this basis, Shelley moves forward to mythologize the components of nature by creating new myths out of the natural forces. He ignores the belief that nature is one being and he alternatively believes that each natural phenomena is a detached being that has its own life and power. Thus, he mythologies the cloud, the night, the west wind and the moon. B. Shelley: Shelley expresses love as one of the godlike phenomena in human life and beauty is the intellectual beauty to him
2). John Keats :(1795-1821)
John Keats is the last important poet of English Romanticism, but differently from Byron and Shelley, he does not express rebellious or utopian ideas, and differently from Wordsworth his poetry contains no moral and social message. He thinks, in fact, the poet's task lies in search of beauty both in man and in nature, since beauty is the only lasting value. Beauty is perceived through the senses, which are the instrument by which man can escape from the ugliness of reality. The central theme of his poetry is the romantic conflict between the ideal and real, between the desire for eternity and the awareness of the passing of time. He turns for inspiration to Greek mythology, as we can see in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and to medieval ballads.
• John Keats' Ideas - The Keatsian Theology
Pursuit of Beauty
With a pure poet, the pursuit of beauty overcomes every other consideration. The poetry of Keats is an unending pursuit of beauty. He pursued truth indeed, but truth for him was beauty. He never intellectualized his poetry. He was gifted with extraordinary sensibility and had an ardent passion for the beauty of the visible world. He therefore cried, “O for a life of sensation rather than of thought” (It may be mentioned here that Keats uses the word ‘thought’ in the sense of abstract reasoning or speculation.) His entire being was thrilled by the beauty of the world; nothing gave him greater delight than the excitement of his sense, produced by ‘a thing of beauty’.
• Spontaneity and concentration of thought and feeling :
Keats was a pure poet in the sense that in his poetry he was a poet and nothing else—not a teacher, not a preacher, not a conscious carrier of any humanitarian or spiritual message. His ambition was to become a poet, pure and simple and his ambition was fulfilled. Poetry came naturally to him, as leaves come to a tree; it was the spontaneous utterance of his powerful feeling. The poetry of Keats x was based on his actual experience of life, and therefore it is marked by spontaneity and intensity. What he experienced and felt upon his pulse he expressed. He actually listened to the song of a nightingale, and the music of the song actually transported him to the world of imagination. In fact, the power of Keats’s poetry is due to intense concentration of thought and feelings.
• Negative capability:
“Stephen Hebron explores Keats’s understanding of negative capability, a concept which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge.”
Keats has an impulse to interest himself in anything he sees or hears. He accepted it and identified himself with it. “If a sparrow comes before my window,” says Keats, “I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” A poet, he says, has no identity. He is continually in, for and filling some other body. “Of the poetic character,” Keats says, “it has no self; it is everything and nothing. It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Imago or Imogene.
What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. This is the spirit of Shakespeare. Though Keats did not fully achieve this ideal, he was growing towards it. For Keats, the necessary quality of poetry is a submission to things as they are, without any effort to intellectualize them into something else. Keats and the nightingale are merged into one—it is his soul that sings in the bird. He was wholly in the place and in the time and with the things of which he wrote. He could be absorbed wholly in the loveliness of the hour and the joy of the moment. (He is fully thrilled by the beauty of autumn. He does not complain.
Similarities and dissimilarities between P.B Shelley and John Keats:
Comparing the Romantic poets generates a wide and varied spectrum, with each widely varying in their individual views of poetry, including ideals, definition of heroes, and evil (Renee'), One of the most distinct attributes of the Romantic writers Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats is their gift of using both opulent and tactile words within their poetry. Both men were great lovers of nature, and an abundance of their poetry is filled with nature and the mysterious magnificence it holds. Though P. B. Shelley and John Keats were mutual friends, but they have haunted the diversified qualities in their vision. These two are the great contributors of English Literature, though their lifecycle was very short. Their comparison is also diminutive with each other, while each are very much similar in thoughts, imagination, creation and also in their lifetime.
Conclusion:
Importance and contributions of these two second generation Romantic poets is not eligible for the events in 19 century England and Europe in general. Rejected by the English society, all of them, as poetes maudits, helped and encouraged each other despite different attitudes when poetry was concerned.
To sum up, in comparing the ideas of Keats and Shelley I use Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats' "To Autumn” to show how they differ from each other . Both these poems have striking similarities when it comes to their rich metaphors; however, the poems differ in almost every other sense. Shelley holds a much more savage notion about the season, while Keats looks upon autumn as being soft and gentle. Shelley's ambitions are expressed in his piece, while Keats only reflects the beauty of what he sees. Both writers display their own unique talent as poets, deserving their titles as being two of the greatest Romantic writers of the period. The two autumnal odes by Shelley and Keats are two diverse points of view on the same subject.
Words: 2281
Images : 5
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