Poet To Keats example essay topic

John Keats was an extraordinary poet, achieving more than most even though he died at 26. He, in his techniques and style, has oft been compared to Shakespeare. John Keats had many opinions about the role of poetry and the role of the poet, and often wrote specifically on the two to his friends and colleagues, providing us with invaluable lessons in life and art. Keats has many theories on what poetry is and what it should do. He believed's that the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate.

"Disagreeables", as he calls them, were a main influence in Keats's writing and life. He saw experience as "a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites". He finds sadness in happiness and pleasure in pain. The highest intensity of love he compares to death.

He thinks that Beauty is Truth, and this is how he explains why we take pleasure in the aesthetic representation of the ugly or painful. To him, Poetry should be agreeable to all; it should not seem stubborn to any viewpoint. Poetry, he claims, should be unimposing, entering into the soul without any startle in itself, but in its subject, for flowers, he explains, do not cry to be admired, for then they would not be such. Poetry should seem like a wording of the reader's highest thoughts, seeming a remembrance more than a revelation. Representation of Beauty should never be less than all-out; it should leave the reader swept away, not merely satisfied. Finally, poetry should have no self, it should not favor light or dark over the other; it should not care more for evil or good than the other.

In the same respect, a poet, he states, should have no identity as well. He should, as Keats did, not favor a certain side of a disagreeable, but both sides as important and necessary. He believes that one should write about what he knew from experience, and from there, a true poet should be masterful at making discoveries and then shedding light on them... Keats writes of states of minds only that he has been in himself. He teaches that poets should employ all of the senses: tactile, gustatory, kinetic, visceral, as well as visual and auditory. Lives are full of evil and suffering, and poets should write accordingly.

The heart's affections are holy and what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, so a poet should write from the heart. A true poet would wish for a life of sensation rather than thought. He proposes that Men of Achievement, especially in literature, possess Negative Capability, or when man is capable of being in uncertainties without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. For a great poet, the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration. A poet, to Keats, shouldn't "brood" over thoughts so much that he arrives at things that are not his true feelings. Poetry should come naturally to the poet or not at all.

Though Keats understood so much of the art of poetry and coined aspects of it so well, he, due to his intense criticism of his own work, did not consider himself the masterful writer that he describes, stating in his Axioms in Poetry that he can arrive at such parameters for poetry, but that he is far from their center. Because of his revolutionary views on poets and their craft, Keats will forever be admired and remembered, however undeserving he may have considered it.