Keat's Romantic Poem, Sleep and Poetry

This study will analyze the romantic view of human nature as expressed in the excerpt from John Keats' "Sleep and Poetry" beginning with the line "O for Ten Years" and ending with the line "The thought of that same chariot, and the strange/ Journey it went." The study will argue that Keats' view of human nature is indeed thoroughly romantic in this excerpt, focusing as he does on the intimate, even mystical connection between man--or at least the voice of the poet--and the idyllic world of nature. Keats expanded the Romantic tradition in poetry in that he gloried in the ability of a human being not only to face his own mortality but also to rise above it through his poetic imagination. As Harold Bloom writes,

What Keats so greatly gives to the Romantic tradition

. . . is what no poet before him had the capability of giving--the sense of the human making choice of a human self, aware of its deathly nature, and yet having the will to celebrate the imaginative richness of mortality (Bloom 6).

The poem is meant by Keats to be a blueprint for the poet's ideal career as envisioned by Keats and as practiced by earlier poets such as Virgil, Spenser and Milton. That career was comprised of a decade of writing about nature and then "climb[ing] up to the level of poetry dealing with 'the agonies, the strife/ Of human hearts'" (Abrams 769). Both concerns--with nature and with the passions of human existence--are included in the general purview of the Romantic poet. In his pursui

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igher concerns: "And can I ever bid these joys farewell?/ Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,/ Where I may find the agonies, the strife/ Of human hearts" (Keats 770). However, in this section of the poem at least, Keats hardly draws a convincing picture of his eventual dedication to the study and experience of human agony and strife. To the contrary, it would seem that he immediately leaves behind such strife for a Romantic trip on a mystical "car" or chariot. Clearly, at this point in the poem the nature of the Romantic poet markedly departs from the nature of average human being. As Murry notes, the poet according to Keats' Romantic scheme will leave the world of Nature for the world of men and women. But the reason he gives is startling--"for lo! I see . . . a car." He has a vision of a chariot and a charioteer, who drives from the sky to the mountains . . . to a concourse of "shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear" . . . . The detail of the vision is obscure; but . . . the charioteer is some strange embodiment of the spirit of Poetry (Murry 159). The "obscure" but certainly Romantic vision Keats describes includes fear and weeping and gloom, but there is no evidence that the poet has experienced anything approach

Category: Literature - K