AN ANALYSIS OF
THREE TYPES OF EMOTIONS IN THE POETRY OF KEATS
By
Wang Yongguang
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Zhang Dingquan
Shanghai International Studies University
May 2008
Acknowledgements
My thanks are especially due to my tutor, professor Zhang Dingquan, without whose
invaluable instruction and timely encouragement this thesis would not have taken shape. I
will never forget the encounter with him on that beautiful evening at the gate of SISU and
the ensuing conversation between a professor and a student, which lit the spark of
inspiration for my writing a thesis on Keats.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to professor Li Weiping, professor Shi Zhikang, and
professor Yu Jianhua, whose wonderful lectures and speeches have laid a solid foundation
for my study, leading me to step into the palace of literature, and more importantly, whose
power of personalities have gradually changed my attitude towards this chaotic world.
I owe special thanks to my best friends Wang Maoyuan and Hu Yongdou, without
whose selfless help and precious friendship I would not have acquired the opportunity to
study in SISU, and no doubt, the river of my life would have flowed in a different
direction.
I am greatly indebted to my family for their great concern and support during my time
pursuing the M.A. degree. I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, my wife
and my little son, whose white hair, sweet smile and naïve voice respectively always
brought tears to my eyes and made me light another cigarette in the darkness of the deep
nights of those unforgettable hard days.
I’m much obliged to all the hardships and setbacks that I have gone through in the
course of pursuing my degree; without all these difficulties, I would not have mastered the
courage to tread bravely in the sacred realm of literature.
Abstract
John Keats (1795—1821) dedicates himself to constructing a realm of beauty in his
poetry, which is woven mainly out of his exuberant emotions. This thesis aims to distill the
main emotions that Keats experiences in his short life, revealing the complicated
relationship among them as well as their roles in the creation of poetry.
There are three types of emotions in Keats’ poetry: the positive emotions, consisting
of happiness and love; the negative emotions that are composed of sorrow, melancholy and
death; and the neutral emotions, comprising solitude and indolence, which serve as a
bridge to link positive to negative emotions. These three types of emotions will be
unfolded bit by bit in the following chapters to elucidate how they act on each other within
Keats’ poetry and ultimately how they enrich the beauty of poetry.
The thesis falls into five parts: chapter one will comment on Keats’ achievements and
present an overview of Keats’ literary review. Chapter two explores Keats’ life and his
aesthetic views. From chapter three on, the thesis will demonstrate these three types of
emotions reflected in Keats’ life and poetry, with chapter three discussing the positive
emotions, chapter four the neutral emotions, and chapter five the negative emotions. The
concluding chapter will summarize the main points of this thesis.
内 容 提 要
约翰·济慈一生致力于诗歌创作，努力用诗的语言构建一个情感丰富的唯美世
界。济慈的情感是复杂的，本论文旨在提炼济慈短暂生命历程中的主要情感要素，揭
示它们之间的，以及它们与诗歌创作的密切关系。
总体分析，济慈的诗歌中有三种情感：积极情感，包括幸福与爱；消极情感，
由忧郁、悲伤和死亡组成；以及连接积极和消极情感的中性情感,即孤独和懒散。在
下面的章节中,这些情感将被一一论及。
论文由五部分组成。 首章介绍济慈诗歌的艺术成就,概述济慈诗歌评论；第二
章介绍济慈短暂人生和他的美学思想；从第三章开始,笔者反复论证济慈一生经历并
反映在他诗歌中的三种情感,分析情感要素对济慈诗歌创作的作用。第三章论证积极
情感:幸福和爱；第四章论证中性情感:孤独和懒散；第五章论证消极情感悲哀、忧郁
和死亡。文章所论述的内容将在结论部分得以总结。
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abstract (English)
Abstract (Chinese)
Introduction…………………………….……..…..…………..... 1
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship.…....………..4
1.1 Keats’ achievements…………….........................................4
1.2 English Reviews on Keats.....................................................5
1.3 Chinese Reviews on Keats...................................................6
Chapter Two Keats’ Life and His Aesthetic Views…..…....…...9
2.1 Keats’ Life and the Formation of Three Types of Emotions in
His Poetry…….………..…………….……………....,………...9
2.2 The Parallel between Three Types of Emotions and Three
Chambers of Human Life…………………………………10
2.3 The Realm of Beauty—the Destination of Emotions in
Keats’Poetry……………………………………………... 12
Chapter Three The Positive Emotions…….…………………14
3.1 Happiness…..……..…………………….…………….… 14
3.1.1 Happiness from Nature………………….………….…14
3.1.2 Happiness from Friendship…………….……………...18
3.2 Love..….……………………………………….....……... 21
3.2.1 The Repression of Sexual Love………..……………...22
3.2.2 The Achievement of Sexual Love in Dreams…….……..24
3.2.3 Love and the Instinct of Death……...……….………...27
Chapter Four Neutral Emotions……………………………... 30
4.1 The Enjoyment of Solitude……..…………………….…...30
4.2 The Appreciation of Indolence..…..……………………..31
4.2.1 “Ode on Indolence”..…………………………………..31
4.2.2 Indolence and Negative Capability….………………...33
4.2.3 Indolence and Nothingness……………………………35
Chapter Five Negative Emotions……………………………....37
5.1 The Attack of Sorrow and the Torture of Melancholy…..37
5.2 The Resurrection through Death………………………...40
5.2.1 Death and Life..……….……………………………....41
5.2.2 “Vale of Soul-Making”…………………………….….42
Conclusion…………………………………………………... 45
Bibliography………………………………………………… 47
Introduction
Introduction
What are emotions? The answers to this ontological question can be traced back to
Aristotle (384-322 BC), a Greek philosopher and logician, who, in his Rhetoric, notes that
“the emotions, are those things . . . which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for
example, anger, pity, fear, and other such things and their opposites” (Aristotle 121).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), one of the Lake Poets, focusing on the emotions in
poetry, proposes, in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, that “all good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility” (Wordsworth 151). This significant statement marks the beginning of the
romantic poets’ commitment to emotion.
Unlike Wordsworth, who expresses his ideas about emotion in his article, John
Keats’ views on emotion are displayed in his letters, which are the storehouse of his
aesthetic views, and in his poetry. They are also expounded through the experiences of his
short life. Keats’ emotions can be classified into three types: the positive emotions,
comprising love and happiness that can be further classified into the happiness from nature
and that from friendship; the neutral emotions, consisting of solitude and indolence; and
the negative emotions that are composed of sorrow, melancholy, and death.
Emotions in Keats are stimulated more directly than in Wordsworth who tends to
derive emotions from the outside world, especially nature. Consequently, when Keats runs
short of poetic inspiration, he draws materials for poetry directly from emotions he has
experienced in his life. Keats’ genius in the creation of poetry owes much to these three
types of emotions. His first published poem is dedicated to the neutral emotion of solitude.
In Endymion, he expresses his happiness derived from nature, friendship, and love.
Moreover, he dedicates two poems directly to the emotions of sorrow, melancholy, and
indolence, and the poem “On Death” is inspired by the irresistible beauty from life and
death.
Because of the existence of the self in his poetry, emotions Wordsworth has
experienced in the outside world has to be released through the medium of his own self,
and since Wordsworth doesn’t realize the existence of the neutral emotions of solitude and
indolence and apply them consciously to his poetic creation, emotions in his poetry are
usually first deposited in his memory. The all the way including himself in the poem
hinders the natural overflow of his strong emotions within the poetry. In “My Heart Leaps
1
Introduction
Up”, the joy from seeing a rainbow is expressed through the medium of the poet’s self. In
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, the emotions of happiness and joy aroused by a host of
daffodils are deposited first in the poet’s memory and delayed by his self in the poem until
one day they overflow from the poet’s recollection. While the annihilation of the self and
the negative capability that originates from the neutral emotions of solitude and indolence
make it possible for Keats to set free his emotions immediately, not being delayed by the
accumulation of emotions in memory and interrupted by the existence of the poet’s self.
Thus, on hearing the song of the nightingale, the poet immediately annihilates his own
identity and joins in the identity of the bird to experience the bliss in it.
In spite of Wordsworth’s influential notion that recollected emotions are the
foundation of poetry, his poetry concerns mainly nature rather than emotions; however,
what Keats mainly extols in poetry are emotions, on the basis of which, Keats puts up an
exquisite poetic frame by reaching a balance between the realm of beauty in poetry and the
sordid reality. Thus, the constant conflict between the positive and negative emotions is
characteristic of the emotional element in Keats’ poetry. Keats holds that joy and pain act
on each other in our life, and the poet is especially selected as a recipient to take more pain
in life than he is supposed to, as he puts it in The Fall of Hyperion:
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low—
The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
(Canto 1, 172-176)
1
According to Keats, the world in which we are living is always on the move, and the
joy derived from it is evanescent and will soon change into pain. At the death of his friend
William Haslam’s father, he writes to his brother George Keats and sister-in-law Georgiana
Augusta Wylie, commenting that “we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure”,
because “circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—While we are
laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events.” (Letters, II,
79).2
Joy can be drawn from beauty, run through the whole course of the appreciation of
beauty, and provide Keats an effective way of escaping the pain of his miserable life, as is
revealed through “A Thing of beauty is a joy forever”, the opening line of Endymion.
However, with the death of the physical beauty in things, the joy derived from physical
beauty is sure to evaporate. Poetry, where the eternal spiritual beauty lies, is more reliable
1
2
All references to Keats’ poetry are to H. W. Garrod’s edition.
All references to Keats’ letters are to Hyder Edward Rollins’ edition.
2
Introduction
than beautiful things in acting as the source of joy. He depends on the emotion of joy so
much that he announces in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey that “I find I cannot exist
without poetry—without eternal poetry—half the day will not do” (Letters, I, 133).
In the following chapters, joy will evolve into the positive emotions of happiness and
love, with happiness branching into the happiness found in nature and friendship. Pain will
advance to sorrow, melancholy, and death. We will find that the conflict and transformation
between joy and pain holds true for the other pairs of emotions.
For a long time, Keats has been regarded as a strong advocate of art for art’s sake,
aspiring simply to reflect sensuous beauty. As a result, Keats’ emotional elements clearly
displayed throughout his poetry and letters have been more or less ignored. This tentative
study of three types of emotions embodied in Keats’ life and poetry is intended to make up
for the oversight of the emotional elements in earlier studies of Keats.
The thesis falls into five parts. Chapter one offers a representative selection of the
literary criticism accorded to Keats since the nineteenth century. Chapter two examines
Keats’ life and his aesthetic views, focusing on the relationship between Keats’ life and the
formation of three types of emotions in his poetry, the parallel of these three types of
emotions and his aesthetic view on three chambers of human life, and the realm of beauty
as the destination of these three types of emotions in Keats’ poetry. The following three
chapters will elucidate in detail the emotions Keats displayed in his life and poetry, with
chapter three focusing on the positive emotions of happiness and love, chapter four on the
neutral emotions of solitude and indolence, and chapter five on the negative emotions of
sorrow, melancholy, and death. The materials presented in the first five chapters will be
summarized and confirmed in the conclusion. In addition, the thesis also provides an
analysis of some representative poems by Keats to help illustrate the essential roles the
emotional elements have played in his poetry.
3
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship
Chapter One
An overview of Keats’ Scholarship
1.1 Keats’ Achievements
John Keats lives only twenty-five years (1795-1821), and his writing career lasts only
five years (1814-1820), yet his poetic achievement is remarkable. Keats’ poetry is not
widely read during his lifetime; instead his reputation as a poet begins to rise nearly twenty
years after his death. Now he is regarded as one of the greatest poets in English literature.
John Keats’ poetry falls into three phases. The first phase consists of the years 1816
and 1817 when his first volume Poems was published. Three poems distinguish themselves
among the immature and crude poems in the first collection of poetry. They are “On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, Sleep and Poetry, and “On the Grasshopper and
Cricket”, in which the young poet expresses respectively his ecstasy when he finds the
golden world of literature, his ambitious plan for becoming a great poet, and his love for
nature and happiness derived from friendship.
His second volume Endymion, published in 1818 and bitterly criticized by
contemporary critics, represents his achievement in the second phase of his poetry. As a
transitional work, the positive emotions of happiness and joy run through the whole
process of the quest for the transcendent beauty in Endymion. The poetic experiments in
writing Endymion make it possible for Keats to reach the threshold of the third phase of his
poetry, which begins after his return from his walking tour to northern England, Scotland,
and Ireland. This third phase marks the culmination of his career as a poet.
The year 1820 witnesses the publication of his third volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella,
The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Apart from the titular three long poems, the
volume contains the six odes, which, even if Keats had never written other poems, would
be great enough to make his name immortal.
Besides his poetic achievements, Keats’ 251 surviving letters, which T.S. Eliot calls
“the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet” (Eliot 100),
record in detail the life of his three fruitful years, provide invaluable insight into his
psychology, and reveal the close relationship between his poetry and his aesthetical views.
As Wolf Z. Hirst states, “They give us a clear picture of his personality, trace his
development as a poet, and are full of spontaneous pronouncements on the nature of poetry
4
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship
which have become starting points for countless discussions on aesthetics” (38).
Keats’ greatness lies in his achieving so great an accomplishment in such a short time.
In slightly more than five years, Keats grows miraculously from a medical apprentice to a
dazzling poet, and his poetic skill evolves from imitation to originality. Some critics
comment that if William Shakespeare (1564-1616), or John Milton (1608-1674) had
stopped writing at the same age, they would not have achieved as much as Keats.
1.2 English Reviews on Keats
Most of Keats’ contemporary critics hold an unfavorable view of his poetry. The early
criticism of Keats’ poetry is mainly from the critics of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
and The Quarterly Review, who maintain that poetry is an art not suitable for Keats, who is
from the middle class and lacks a classical education. John Gibson Lockhart, in the August
1818 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine mocks Keats’ 1817 poems saying, “It is a
better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop
Mr. John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” (95).
Despite the harsh attack on the young poet, Leigh Hunt, an English poet and essayist,
thinks highly of Keats and praises the young poet warmly. In the December 1, 1816 issue
of The Examiner, Hunt predicts ardently the birth of a new genius poet, whose poetry
“called to mind the finer times of the English Muse” (426). Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822), in his “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”, laments the death of
Keats by comparing Keats to Adonais, the lover of the goddess of beauty, and his critics to
the wild beast. He goes on to say that Keats’ death is our common loss and his name will
always be mentioned like an echo and his fame will last for all eternity.
Most nineteenth century critics have a one-sided view of Keats’ work, seeing him as a
sensual poet. It takes over twenty years after Keats’ death for critics to reevaluate his
poetry, and since the mid-nineteenth century, Keats’ lofty reputation in English literature or
even world literature has never been challenged.
In studying the life and works of Keats, his biographies play an important role in
introducing his life, poetry, and poetic theories. Charles Armitage Brown published in 1841
The Life of John Keats, which offers a unique insight into Keats’ life. As Keats’ close
friend, Brown has the advantage of getting firsthand materials for writing a memoir of the
poet. Richard Monckton Milnes’ Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, the
first modern sense biography of Keats, came out in 1848. The work examines Keats and
his thoughts from a more objective view than that of Brown. Amy Lowell, an American
poet, wrote in 1925 the massive 2-volume biography John Keats, in which she uses a
historical approach to study Keats’ poetry, confirming for the first time Fanny Brawne’s
5
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship
positive influence on Keats. Robert Gittings’ John Keats, published in 1968, covers all the
major events in Keats’ life, being noted for its treatment of Keats’ family background,
financial difficulties, and Keats’ love for Fanny Brawne.
Keats’ position and value in the Romantic Movement are reconsidered by critics in the
twentieth century, some of whom still use traditional ways to study Keats’ poetry, paying
much attention to his imagery, style, and the structure of his poems; meanwhile, modern
critics focus on Keats’ political tendency, his poetic theories, the treatment of women in his
poetry, the rapid development of his poems, and the discord between the initial, negative
reception of Keats and the outstanding literary reputation he enjoys today, using various
new-born literary approaches to examine Keats’ poetry from different perspectives. Karla
Alwes studies the women in Keats’ poetry, claiming that an abundance of female figures is
characteristic of Keats’ works. She notes that there is always one or more feminine
characters appearing in Keats’ major poems, constituting the main imagery of the poems.
She asserts that the female character “serves alternately as a means of preservation and as
an agent of destruction to the poetry’s male heroes” (6). Morris Dickstein analyzes the
effect of Keats’ middle-class origin and the unfavorable reviews by critics on his poetry.
He suggests that Keats’ early association with the Cockney School led by Leigh Hunt and
his liberal tendency in politics influence the critics’ view on his poetry. Andrew Motion,
British poet and critic, in his biography, Keats, presents and analyzes Keats’ political
opinions in detail and argues that Keats’ work reflects the society of his time, and
combines “a political purpose with a poetic ambition, a social search with an aesthetic
ideal” (36). Walter Jackson Bates examines the development of Keats’ literary criticism
since the beginning of the twentieth century, concluding, “Few poets have elicited more
analysis and discussion since the close of the last century than has Keats. His poetry, with
the aid of his letters, has been studied from almost all angles; it has been re-interpreted
biographically and philosophically” (1).
1.3 Chinese Reviews on Keats
Chinese readers begin to know John Keats from Xu Zhimo (1897-1931),
representative of New Moon poets, who is deeply influenced by Keats and whose poem
“To Oriole” is, so to speak, the Chinese version of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. In his
essay “Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale”, written on December 2, 1913, Xu Zhimo gives a
thorough account of the emotions embodied in that immortal poem. Following Xu Zhimo,
numerous Chinese scholars have shown great interest in the study of Keats. The poet Tu
An plays a significant role in introducing Keats to Chinese readers by translating a
selection of Keats’ poetry, which was published in 1997 by People’s Literature Publishing
6
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship
Press and won the award of Lu Xun Literature for Translation. As a result of Tu An’s
agonizing experiences during the Cultural Revolution, he is able to connect with Keats on
a very personal level and this greatly enhances the quality of the translated poems. Wang
Zuoliang, professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University, in his A History of English
Poetry, reviews Keats’ achievement as a poet, observing that Keats shows his love for his
fellow men and willingly and courageously shoulders the miseries of the world through his
poetry.
The aesthetic and the historic method have long dominated the criticism of John
Keats’ poetry in the past century. The aesthetic approach undertakes to explore the
aesthetic value in Keats’ poetry, while the latter devotes itself to the exploration of the
influence of society and politics on Keats’ poetry. Chen Jia, in his A History of English
Literature, comments on Keats’ poetry from the perspectives of both aesthetics and politics.
He holds that Keats is, on the one hand, “a singer and an advocate of the cult of beauty, a
writer of ‘pure poetry’, a sort of ‘art for art’s sake’ dreamer who steeped himself in poetic
fancy and fantasy” (Chen, 3:132), on the other hand, the artistic beauty in Keats’ poetry
contrasts sharply with the ugly social reality, since “his sympathies were always on the side
of the oppressed and exploited masses, and his joy in nature and in art was in a sense a
mild form of protest against the brutal and cruel society” (Chen, 3:132).
No one has yet presented a Critique of all the emotions in Keats’ life or poetry, but
some Chinese researchers on Keats have focused on one or two emotions in their reviews
of his work. In the article “Lamenting over Fruitless Love and Unlucky Fate—Impressions
from Reading Keats's Critical Biography and Letters”, Liu Zhiliang explores Keats’ love
for Fanny Brawne, but he attributes Keats’ failure in love only to his illness and early death,
failing to explore the other aspects of Keats’ complicated love psychology and ignoring
Keats’ achievement of sexual and platonic love through poetry. In another essay “It Is
Forever a Song Whether Sad or Joyous—After Reading Five Sonnets of Keats”, Liu
Zhiliang focuses on the poet’s views on friendship, love, nature, life, and death to analyze
Keats’ five sonnets. However, although his essay touches upon most of the emotions Keats
experiences in his life, what he wants to emphasize is the theme of these five sonnets, not
the emotions themselves.
Bai Shuxia, in her essay “A Song of Autumn: the Mixture of Joy and
Melancholy—An Analysis of Keats’ ‘To Autumn’”, reveals the happiness derived from
nature and the transience of beauty in things, touching upon the joy and melancholy that
are intertwined in “To Autumn”. However, Bai Shuxia does not distinguish physical beauty
from spiritual beauty, so her essay fails to reveal the source and essence of the
7
Chapter One An Overview of Keats’ Scholarship
transformation between joy and melancholy.
Li Zheng-shuan and Li Hui-fang, in their article “A Comparative Study of the
Negative Capacity and Materialization by John Keats and Zhuangzi”, compares
Zhuangzi’s materialization with Keats’ negative capability, noting that “materialization
invites a kind of spiritual concentration besides the seeming passiveness, while negative
capability puts emphasis on the negative ability of the mind” (李正栓、李会芳 112).
According to Li Zheng-shuan and Li Hui-fang, Keats’ applying negative capability to his
poetry aims only at revealing the sense of beauty in poetry. They fail to reveal the
nothingness hiding behind negative capability through the neutral emotion of indolence,
though they have found the “Tao” lying behind Zhuangzi’ materialization. Zhang Jin and
Li Min-gang go further than Li Zheng-shuan and Li Hui-fang. In their article “The Wit of
Keats’ Negative Capability”, they link Keats’ negative capability to the notion of a poet of
no identity, and Chinese Tao. Although they have, to a degree, uncovered the internal
relationship between these aesthetic thoughts, neither Li Zheng-shuan and Li Huifang, nor
Zhang Jin and Li Min-gang have found the relationship between Keats’ poetic theories and
the neutral emotions of solitude and indolence. Therefore, their articles have little to do
with Keats’ emotions.
Zhang Guo-chen and Li Jun’s article “Death of Beauty—A Talk about Keats’ View
on Death from his Poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’”, is one of only a few articles on Keats’
emotion of death written by Chinese researchers in which a study is made of the notion of
death by analyzing Keats’ life experiences, psychology, and his poems.
Although the literary review I have covered in this paper is far from complete, I am
convinced that no one has given a panoramic view of the emotional element in Keats’ life
and poetry, so this tentative study focusing on three types of emotions in Keats’ poetry
contributes to the knowledge accumulated by the researchers who have preceded me.
8
Chapter Two Keats’ Life and His Aesthetic Views
Chapter Two
Keats’ Life and His Aesthetic Views
2.1 Keats’ Life and the Formation of Three Types of Emotions in His
Poetry
John Keats’ short life is imbued with endless miseries and dotted with transient
pleasant feelings, which make him live in a constant conflict of two kinds of opposite
emotions. The emotions in his poetry are deeply rooted in the emotions that he experiences,
so a sketch of his life will help us find the sources of his exuberant emotions both in reality
and poetry.
Keats’ childhood was gloomy with the early death of his parents. In 1804, his father
fell from a horse and died. Six years later, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving four
children in the care of their grandparents. Keats left school shortly after his mother’s death
and was apprenticed to a surgeon named Hammond who was living in the neighborhood.
In 1814, with the death of his grandmother Jennings, the family was finally split up.
During this period, loneliness dominated his mind.
On October 1, 1815, Keats resumed his surgical studies at Guy’s hospital in London.
His work as a medical student connects him closely with death, since in order to complete
his medical training, he has to wash wounds for patients, and watch operations performed
on fully conscious patients by the surgeons. In 1816, Keats obtained his apothecary license
and worked as a dresser and junior surgeon for a short time before devoting himself
entirely to poetry later that same year. Keats is familiar with and awed by the power of
death; he is also sensitive to the approach of his own death. His proximity to death has a
profound influence on his poetic imagination concerning this topic.
Keats spent the autumn of 1818 looking after his youngest brother Tom Keats, who
had been seriously ill with tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken his mother’s life.
Tom Keats’ death on December 1, 1818, wounds Keats so much that he is swallowed by an
immense sorrow, which soon develops into the negative emotion of melancholy.
Shortly after Tom’ death, Keats moved to Wentworth Place, Hampstead to live with
his friend Brown. There he met and fell deeply in love with a young neighbor, Fanny
Brawne. His feelings towards her are recorded in a letter dated July 1, 1919, in which
Keats suggests that if both of them were butterflies living together for but three summer
9
Chapter Two Keats’ Life and His Aesthetic Views
days, those three days would be filled with more pleasure than 50 common years could
hold. Unfortunately, the delight derived from his love for Fanny Brawne is transient, and it
is doomed to be replaced by the pain of not being able to acquire it because of his illness
and poverty. Keats’ love for Fanny Brawne is complicated, for it is connected not only with
such emotions as jealousy, disappointment, and pain, which are common for any person in
love, but also with emotions related to death.
In the autumn of 1819, Keats himself was also stricken with tuberculosis. The poems
written during this period are marked with melancholy and dominated by the emotions of
sorrow and death partly because of his failure to marry Fanny Brawne and partly due to his
awareness of the approaching of death. The fact that almost all his great works are
completed in the period that Keats calls “posthumous existence” (Letters, II, 359) indicates
clearly the creativity of the emotions of love, sorrow, and melancholy mixed with each
other.
When his illness worsened, he sailed for Italy in September of 1820 accompanied by
his bosom friend, painter Joseph Severn, to escape England’s cold winter. The fine weather
in Italy didn’t save Keats from the hands of death and he died in Rome on February 23,
1821. He was buried in the protestant cemetery, where another famous romantic poet,
Shelley, was buried soon after. Keats’ death doesn’t mean the end of his life but signifies
the start of his afterlife, as his soul has lifted in the melodious song of the nightingale with
his name written on the flowing water of the finite world.
2.2 The Parallel between Three Types of Emotions and Three
Chambers of Human Life
Keats divides human life into three stages, which he respectively compares to a
thoughtless chamber, a maiden-thought chamber, and an unnamed third chamber where all
the negative emotions reside. His poetry should also be divided into three stages, with the
poems collected in 1817 Poems corresponding to the thoughtless chamber, Endymion, the
maiden-thought chamber, and the poems written after the publication of Endymion, the
third chamber.
The theory of chambers of human life is elaborated in his letter to his close friend
John Hamilton Reynolds dated Sunday, May 3, 1818:
I will put down a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it; that is, to the point to
which I say we both have arrived at—Well—I compare human life to a large Mansion of
Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet
shut upon me—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which
we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a long while, and
notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright
appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by
10