Keats and Romanticism

Romanticism was a movement in literature, music and art from the

late 18th Century until the mid 19th Century. Although some of the writers and artists were friends, they did not necessarily see themselves as a unified group.

Politically, the movement was inspired by the American War of Independence and, more especially, the French Revolution of 1789.

The movement rejected authoritarian forms of government, and many of the artists and writers in the movement favoured republics.

Artistically, the movement is often seen as a reaction against the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the intellectual movement which dominated European and American thought from the 18th Century onwards.

The Romantic movement also coincided with the Gothic revival, which was preoccupied with death, horror, mediaeval settings and dark atmospheres.

Romanticism

The Romantic movement rejected: 18th Century Classicism. The ordered rationality of the Enlightenment. Impersonal and artificial feeling. Industrialisation. Conservative morality.

Romanticism

Romanticism embraced: Freedom of individual expression. Feelings of spontaneity, sincerity and

originality. Emotional directness. The power of the imagination and dreams. The power and beauty of the natural world.

Romanticism

The ‘big six’ of English romantic poetry are: William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel

Taylor Coleridge. George Gordon (Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley

and John Keats. The English romantic poets drew inspiration, in

terms of content matter and form, from Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Shakespeare. Homer, Dante, the 14th century Italian writers Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Pindar were also major influences, particularly on Keats.

Romanticism

Typical themes of English Romanticism: Remembered childhood Mythology Revolution Imagination The exiled hero Unrequited love Power of the natural world

Romanticism

Born 1795. Died 1821. Many of his most celebrated works were written

between 1818 and 1819. Keats’s father was killed after a fall from a horse when Keats was eight

years old. Keats’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. Initially wanted to be a doctor, and registered as a student at Guy’s

Hospital. Keats’s younger brother Tom died of tuberculosis in 1818 – Keats had

nursed him for several months. Keats fell in love with a close neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Their

relationship was an intense one, but was never consummated. They were engaged, but Keats’s health and finances made marriage impossible.

Keats died in Rome at the age of twenty-five, after a long battle against tuberculosis, the disease that killed his mother and brother.

Key Events in Keats’s Life

Keats was thin, delicate and generally in poor health. Sensitive and

slightly effeminate, he was derided by the more ‘macho’ Lord Byron, who referred to ‘Johnny Keats’s piss a bed poetry’.

Wordsworth talked about the ‘egotistical sublime’ and focused on his own creative genius, but Keats referred to ‘negative capability’, the ability of the poet to have no self, and to have doubts and uncertainties.

Most of Keats’s poems focus on love: spiritual or physical, for beauty, nature or art. These have often been considered ‘feminine’ concerns. Keats’s poems contain few references to ‘manly’ issues such as history and politics.

Keats’s attitude towards women is ambiguous: sometimes he depicts them as victims, at other times as inflicting pain on men. He seems to admire them, and also fear them. Perhaps his idealised and unconsummated love for Fanny Brawne may help to explain this?

Keats: the Writer and the Man

www.ron.umontreal.ca www.rc.umd.edu www.eup.ed.ac.uk/journals/Romanticism www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism www.john-keats.com www.englishhistory.com/keats.html

Links