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3.The Eve of St. Agnes（1819）, written in
Spenserian stanzas, is a narrative poem, whose plot and mood are similar to
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Madeline and her lover Porphyro are from two
hostile families. She was told that if she dreamed of her future husband on
the eve of St. Agnes’s Day, the dream might come true. Madeline practices it
and when she wakes from her dreams, she finds Porphyro, who slipped into her
room secretly at the previous night, by her bedside. Then they escape
together. The poem is rich in beautiful images and verbal music, just like
Romeo and Juliet. For instance, in the first stanza:
“St. Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a – cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
Keats’ adoration of sensuous beauty and his ability of painting exact word
picture find the best expression here.
4.The Story of Lamia（1819）is similar to the tale of White Maiden of
Chinese opera. It is a fairy tale about a serpent maiden who loves a young
man. This young man, who attracted by her beauty, marries her. But on their
wedding party, everything shattered. A guest called Apollious, with his
sophist’s eye, inhumanely destroys all charm and beauty with his “cold
philosophy”. In this long poem Keats pursues beauty in an extreme, and at
the same time, he attacks the cold reason with a fully disgust.
5.Hyperion is an unfinished long epic, which is regarded as Keats’
greatest achievement in poetry. It is derived from Greek mythology. The poem
is about the struggle for power in Heaven, which includes two fragments:
Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion. This poem proves that Keats is
not only good at the description of gentle beauty, but also good at the
description of mighty beauty. For instance, when describing the beauty of
Apollo, Keats wrote that:
“So on our heel a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And dated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos.
……….
for ’tis the internal law
That first in beauty should be first in might:
Yea, by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.”
In Apollo, there is a mighty beauty, which is different from
the beauty Keats creates in his other poems: instead of gentle and moonlike,
this beauty is connected with sun, gives the impression of strength, power.
His pursuit of beauty in all things bespoke an
aspiration after a better life. It, in another way but not less power,
denounces the sordid reality—the noisy
materialism and commercialism. His
principle of pursuit of beauty later inspires the movement of
Aestheticism
whose theory is “art for art’s sake” and Imagism profoundly.
Besides the numerous excellent poems he composed, Keats’ letters, published
in 1848 and 1878, have also been regarded, with almost the admiration given
to his poetry, as a precious commentary. The letters he wrote to Fanny
Brawne, to his brothers and sister, to Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Hadon, Stevern
and many others, mixed the everyday events of his own life with lively wits
and high spirits as well as his profoundest thoughts on love, poetry, and
the nature of man. T.S. Eliot even regarded the letters as “the most notable
and most important ever written by any English poet”.
To be regarded as one of the principal figures in the Romantic Movement,
Keats’ stature as a poet had grown steadily through all changes of fashion.
Tennyson considered him as the greatest poet of the 19th century, and M.
Arnold praised his “intellectual and spiritual passion” for beauty. In the
20th century, he has been discussed and reconsidered by critics from T.S.
Eliot and Leavis to
Trilling and Christopher Ricks with great admiration.
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