The poetry of John Keats

Fragments.

by Uditha Devapriya-February 28, 2016 |

When I think of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge today, what springs to mind is how their politics reflected their poetry. Wordsworth was 19 and Coleridge 17 when the French Revolution broke out. It was in their youth, in other words, that France underwent the Fall of the Bastille and the execution of the monarch. The youthful idealism that greeted the former incident – so full of promise in its vision for the future, free of injustice – couldn’t survive the shock of the latter event, after which the Revolution congealed into a harsh political actuality that England and Europe had to combat.

What happened to Wordsworth and Coleridge during this time was inevitable: lost initially in their youthful ardour over the Revolution, they regressed to jingoism and conservatism in later years. This was to be seen most in Wordsworth: when in his early poems he could write of his sympathy for the downtrodden, in later years (particularly in the period in which he wrote “England”, “The Excursion” and the sonnets on the English Church) he reversed that sympathy. He was no longer contemplating on poverty and injustice as though they could only be “resolved” by overthrow of tyranny. He wrote of them as inevitable, as finding resolution only through an almost mystical tranquillity (“She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here”).

Contrast these two against Lord Byron and Percy Shelley (who were born after them), and you will realise how easy it is to categorise their poetry in the face of what happened in France. The latter two weren’t born during the Revolution. They were the “children of the Revolution”, so to speak, which meant that they didn’t take the usual route idealists took before recapitulating. They were born of the Revolution, and hence in their hands the personal was closely intertwined with the political. In the end, they became heretics and rebels (“And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night / In the van of the morning light”).

It’s difficult to compare John Keats with either of these poets, particularly when we consider that he was a contemporary of Byron and Shelley. He was the youngest in their generation (Shelley was three years older than him). And yet, to my mind, Keat’s best poetry shares some affinity with Wordsworth, particularly in the latter’s idealisation of nature and beauty. The irony of course is that Keats was no Wordsworth when it came to the ideology he articulated through those poems of his, and in this regard he is more at home with Byron (more than Shelley, I should add, for Shelley could at times give into political rhetoric, which almost never happened with Byron).

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