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 pursuit of such a career and such concerns, Keats felt himself to be kin to such contemporaries as Shelley and, especially, Wordsworth (Abrams 769).
Certainly part of the message of this section of the poem is that the poet is a superior being who is destined to rise above the daily concerns of other human beings. The human nature of which Keats writes in the poem, then, is a special one, defined not only by the Romantic tradition but also by the ideal evolu...