Keats’s Early Poetic Vision: Between the Confines of the Real and the Ideal

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand Keats’s early poems as an attempt to shape his poetic identity. While his first volume of poetry can be seen in its entirety as the place where Keats plays out his desire (or even his urge/necessity) to discover his poetic self, two important poems, ‘I Stood tip-toe’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’ fully illustrate his tribute to literature, imagination, and the poetic mind. Like other Romantic poets, Keats has not been spared criticism for being solipsistic. However, as these early poems already demonstrate, his celebration of the poet or poetry is not solipsistic, but rooted in a profound belief in the power of literature to reach out and elevate the human soul above sorrow and loss. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’ Keats attacks the ‘elitist’ neoclassicism in order to bridge rather than increase the gap between poetry and society. He is trying to assimilate his poetry and art in general into the culture and lives of the people. Writing after the Enlightenment, which glorified reason and science, Keats is committed to shedding new light on the role of the imagination and poetry, tapping into man’s most intimate and authentic feelings. Circulating underneath his enchantment with poetry is the lingering concern with the legitimation of the poetic imagination. In ‘I Stood tip-toe’ the lyrical ‘I’ finds education in nature and goes back to myth and to the narrative of poetic beginnings in order to articulate a poetic vision. Keats’s later poetry-writing, or, poetry-making, has evolved but has never abandoned the early tenets of his poetic design.