Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
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Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from
the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the
fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a
type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote
under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions,
inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as
he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty
cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed
must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with
the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the
manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth
is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and
essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall
the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his
divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but
only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.
In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading
ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves
into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex
fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual
illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and
self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to
be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a
thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of
his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main
current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He
draws out 'the one bare circumstance,' to use his own phrase, of the
story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading
us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over
the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed,
is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is
something of Oriental bewilderment--an Arabian Night's jugglery with
space and time--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are
effected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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