Exploration of Romantic Themes in John Keats’ Poetry

Introduction
John Keats whose life was tragically lost at the age of 25 has left behind collection of poems which still continue to surprise and inspire readers so many years later. In his poems Keats describes feelings and emotions as they appear in his experience without trying to conceal anything, especially not his deep melancholy and sometimes thoughts about death. His poems are colourful and powerful and famous for the passionate treatment of the common Romanticism topics such as beauty, nature and imagination. The greatest achievement that Keats has done is the fact that he managed to write such a great number of poems in so short time. As Peter Harness said it: “Keats worked at a prolific rate, almost as if he had some intimation of his early death.” (Keats, 2004:9) No matter what it was that made him write at such speed and with such inspiration we, the readers of many centuries later, can be only thankful for such passion for writing because without it we would have no evidence of John Keats’ great talent and sensitive world-view. The fact that makes Keats’ poems so special is that they at the same time sound sophisticated and in some cases also complicated from language point of view and very genuine and true to the poet’s inner feelings.
The analysis that will be carried out in my paper is aimed at showing the poetry of John Keats from as many aspects as possible – as a part of Romantic poetry, from point of view of themes that appear in the poems and images that are used to describe the themes. There are several major themes which appear again and again in Keats’ poems and not only there but also in the poems of other Romantic poets and therefore these themes can be analyzed as common to the whole movement which also will be done in last chapter. The final aim of the paper is to make an overview of the things that made Keats’ poetry so special and not only his but also of all the Romanticism poets. The hypothesis which the author of the paper will attempt to prove is that John Keats’ poetry reflects the essence of the whole movement of Romanticism through the themes that the author has chosen to write about.
Divided into ten chapters my paper aims at giving a comprehensive summary and analysis of Romantic themes and influences in Keats’ poetry and also a comparison of Keats’ poetry with poetry of other Romantic poems which is important in order to understand the overall tendencies of the Romanticist movement and the way that Keats’ poetry fit into it and helped to improve it. The themes explored are: nature, beauty, imagination, religion, death and mythology as seen by John Keats.
1. Romanticism Movement in Literature
Romanticism is an intellectual movement which developed in late eighteenth century. It was a revolt against the values and ideas expressed in the period of Enlightenment and in particular against the rationalization of nature.…