“ROMANTIC AESTHETICS”

Q1:Provide a comparative analysis of Odes by john Keats . References

are mandatory?

ANS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF JOHN KEATS ODES:

English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31,1795, inLondon. Keats
published three books of poetry in life time but was dismissed as a middle-class
interloper by most critics. He had no advantages of birth, welth or education; he
lost his parents in childhood. Yet grief and hardship never destroyed his passionat
commitment to poetry. Keats died at the age of 25 years. He was the younger
poet in the history of English literature.

Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its
inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day,
and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. Examples of great beauty and
art also caused Keats to ponder morality, as in “on seeing the Eligin Marbles”.
Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming
as great as Shakespeare or John Milton. In his poetry, Keats proposed the
contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death.

When reading the titles of the two “poems” one immediately recognizes that they
have got something in common. This common “properity” is referred to by the
teaching term “Ode”, which originally was to denoted a song. Favourite topics of
the Ode are God, Religion, the State, Art, Nture, Truth, Love, Enjoyment of life, or
Fame after Death. I have chose two famous Odes by Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
and Ode an a Grecian Urn, both of them exemplify Keats’ style and main topics
are pretty well.

In Ode to a Nightingale the poet projects his yearning for ideal beauty onto a
symbol which takes part in both time and eternity. Thus, the tension between the
world of being and the world of flux are overcome. The symbol of the merging of
the two contradictory “States” is the nightingale which on the one hand is a
subjective and moral bird and which on the other hand due to its singing which
can be enjoyed independently of a single bird. Keats describes an experience in
the course of its very happening, and so he allows the reader to take part in it
directly. The direct description of the experienced emotions and the write down
of each stirring in the very moment of its arising supplies the Ode with dynamism
and tension.

The same to is dealt with in Ode on a Grecian Urn. A now antique piece of art
symbolizes eternity which then contained the ashes of a dead person. The use of
an object as a symbol remindes of the literary genre of the picture poem,
(“Gemaldegedichty”) whose main content is the enthusiastic description of a
painting or a sculpture. The respective piece of art, in this case the Urn, can be
regardedas a permanent manifestation of perfect beauty. Consquently, the Urn
does not only stand for eternity and Art but also for Nature and Love, for ideal
beauty depends on Nature. If there is reflection on reality and the ideal world
which is always imaginative, people must be able to imagine and invent a
situation or “State” in which the two contrasting notions are merged. This “State”
is regarded as paradise.

Death and loss are prevalent in John Keats Ode To Autumn and Ode on
Melancholy, and comparison can be made between the two concerning the
imagery, metaphoric language and philosophical ideas put forward by Keats in his
exploration of these to themes.

In Ode To Autumn, Keats puts forward the concept of death more subtly: he
chooses not to implicity show it off to the reader, however it is implied as an
underlying tone of the poem.

Happiness and beauty are two devices used to highlight their opposites, loss and
death themselves, the way happiness and beauty are included by Keats is similar
in both poems, as they need to be obvious to the reader in both pieces. In TO
Autumn, we see natural beauty being described as a refulgent thing; “fill all fruit
with ripeness to the core”. Keats’ idea and loss are different in each poem; or
rather his ideas death and loss in Ode on Melancholy have been unexaggerated
and reworked in Ode To Autumn.
In Ode on Melancholy, death and loss are grandly set up next to happiness and
beauty ; the whole first stanza warns the reader against death. Keats attempts to
tell the reader that beauty and death go hand in hand, and this quotation is
perfect for the image, the happen acting almost as amirror for beauty and death.
The poet is explaining that true happiness and beauty cannot be experienced
without also knowing bitter melancholy; no one will experience happiness save
him whose strenuous tongue can brust joy’s grape against his palate fine.