The Platonic & Romantic in Keats & Shelley
The poetical works of both Keats and Shelley are filled with Platonic imagery. However, their works do reject some of Plato’s fundamental assertions. Perhaps Shelley does so most strongly when he makes his argument that it is poets, not philosophers, who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Plato, of course, felt only a well-trained philosopher who in time had come to know the highest form, the Good, could be a legislator. Keats, too, cherishes the Platonic, but rejects some of Plato’s assertions. One of these is Plato’s assertion that only knowledge leads to an awareness of the Good, even though an absolute knowledge of the Good may remain something that transcends human awareness. Keats, on the other hand, believes the artist, i.e. poet, once again approaches the highest form of being but not from learning knowledge only “The poet, like the flower, must remain alive and alert to sensations, rather than run around after knowledge like the bee, an idea that echoes Keat’s concept of Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Goellnicht 100).
Plato felt that only the most trained philosophers with an awareness of the form of the Good were fit to improve society as leaders. While Keats and Shelley may agree that it is the highest mind that improves society, they both believe that role is manifested best in the artist “Poetry was, of course, never far from politics in Shelley’s mind. The mind, at its most constructive, would build a better society. So, Cameron is surely right to add that the expression in poetry of this intellectual beauty is a power making for human progress, for it holds up a continual ideal and stimulates the mind to a creation of new objects” (Pirie 26).
Despite there being a rejection of some of Plato’s concepts
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