Author: Ronald A. SharpPublisher:
ISBN: 9780820304700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty
Author: Ronald A. SharpPublisher:
ISBN: 9780820304700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Skepticism and Aestheticism: Keats's Humanized Religion of Beauty
Author: Ronald Alan SharpJohn Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence
Author: Keith D. WhitePublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900448499X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence traces Keats's use of an Appolonian metaphor. Of the nearly 150 works listed in Jack Stillinger's standard edition, approximately half contain references to the god of nature and of art. What emerges are three distinct phases in Keats's aesthetic development. From his initial fondness for bower imagery and the pastoral voices of Spenser and Hunt, to the Neo-Platonism of his poems about art and imagination, to his ultimate rejection of romantic idealism, Keats and his Apollonian metaphor are rarely separated. The poet's dismissal of romantic idealism is ultimately a rejection of Blake's God, Coleridge's of Germanism, Wordsworth's Nature, Byron's Hellenism, and Shelley's Supernaturalism. The young poet dies aware of the excesses of his empirically oriented pleasant smotherings and idealistic realms of gold. He accepts a world without Apollo and his entourage, a world unembellished by art and other gilded cheats.
Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies
Author: Jennifer N. WunderPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317109392
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Jennifer Wunder makes a strong case for the importance of hermeticism and the secret societies to an understanding of John Keats's poetry and his speculations about religious and philosophical questions. Although secret societies exercised enormous cultural influence during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they have received little attention from Romantic scholars. And yet, information about the societies permeated all aspects of Romantic culture. Groups such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons fascinated the reading public, and the market was flooded with articles, pamphlets, and books that discussed the societies's goals and hermetic philosophies, debated their influence, and drew on their mythologies for literary inspiration. Wunder recovers the common knowledge about the societies and offers readers a first look at the role they played in the writings of Romantic authors in general and Keats in particular. She argues that Keats was aware of the information available about the secret societies and employed hermetic terminology and imagery associated with these groups throughout his career. As she traces the influence of these secret societies on Keats's poetry and letters, she offers readers a new perspective not only on Keats's writings but also on scholarship treating his religious and philosophical beliefs. While scholars have tended either to consider Keats's aesthetic and religious speculations on their own terms or to adopt a more historical approach that rejects an emphasis on the spiritual for a materialist interpretation, Wunder offers us a middle way. Restoring Keats to a milieu characterized by simultaneously worldly and mythological propensities, she helps to explain if not fully reconcile the insights of both camps.
Keats
Author: Robert M. RyanPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691265003
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
A landmark account of how Keat’s religion shaped his life and poetry John Keats (1795–1821) was an earnest seeker after truth who believed in the existence of a Supreme Being and felt a need to investigate the consequences and ramifications of that belief. Keats: The Religious Sense reconstructs the historical, social, and intellectual environment that fostered Keats’s religious convictions and describes the faith he adopted for himself. In this landmark book, Robert Ryan follows Keats’s religious development through its observable chronological stages, beginning with the process by which he abandoned the Christian faith of his upbringing. Ryan shows how religious speculation and discussion played a significant formative role in the poet’s intellectual development, especially in the years of his greatest achievement, and argues that Keats’s critical judgments of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth—as well as some of his famous theoretical pronouncements on poetry, including his remarks on “negative capability” and “the truth of Imagination”—cannot be fully understood without understanding the religious context in which they were made.
On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility
Author: G. Douglas AtkinsPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319441442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 106
Book Description
This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats’s poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to “the responsible poet.” Focusing on Keats’s sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot’s treatment of similar subjects; “The Eve of St. Agnes” by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem an addendum outlining a bold new reading; “Lamia” by focusing on its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot, poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats’s successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas, accentuating the image of him as “the responsible poet.”
Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure
Author: Ayumi MizukoshiPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230285902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
This book tackles the age-old interpretative problem of 'pleasure' in Keat's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard narrative which attribute Keat's astonishing poetic development to his separation from Hunt, the author cogently argues that Keats, profoundly imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.
The Cambridge Companion to Keats
Author: Susan J. WolfsonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521658393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture and the relation of his poetry to the visual arts. These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.
John Keats
Author: R. WhitePublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230281443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the context of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death.
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
Author: Porscha FermanisPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748637818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.