Abstract
This research examines the influence of Romantic poet John Keats on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a Victorian artistic and literary movement. The aim of this paper is to prove how Keats became, moreover, a major connecting link between Romanticism and the Victorian era, thus enabling the continued existence of certain Romantic aesthetic features until the beginning of the twentieth century. In that sense, we will explore how this influence took shape and we will analyse Pre-Raphaelite works of art which have as source of inspiration some of Keats’s well-known poems (“Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”). This examination will allow us to perceive the manner in which these artists devised their pictorial style based on Keatsian pictorialism in poetry, with a special emphasis on the significance of medievalism, and the beauty and sensuousness of his verses, and how they were transferred into their canvases.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that John Keats was one of the strongest poetic influences on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which attests to the aesthetic continuities between the Romantic and Victorian periods
Throughout this article we have seen the extent of Romantic influence in the PRB’s manifesto; their style and aesthetics based themselves on certain key ideas, namely, truth to nature, the revolt against idealisation and artistic conventions, and the free play of imagination
Pre-Raphaelite imagination, would partly find its roots in Keats’s luxurious poetry and this enabled the transposal of qualities such as medievalism, the stress on individuality and imaginative power or the relevance of sensuality or the grotesque
Summary
The confluence between literature and art is a well-established notion. Writers and poets have been inspired by works of art throughout history, yielding to what we call ekphrasis. On the basis of the thesis that Keats was one of their major sources of inspiration, a model, and a linking influence for the Brotherhood, we will explore key Pre-Raphaelites’ works of art derived from Keatsian poetry, focusing mainly on “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil”, in order to see how this influence materialised in their paintings. This research has been mainly based on the analysis of John Keats’s poetry, especially those poems featured in depth in the corpus, as well as a keen observation of the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and the reading of extensive bibliography in order to provide more background. We will examine relevant literary themes and motifs in Keatsian poetry, such as sensuality and medievalism, or important concepts, such as the notions of beauty or imagination, which permeated into the Pre-Raphaelites’ style and ideals. The analysis of specific paintings will accompany this study and it will be presented comparatively with the Keatsian poems that served as major sources of inspiration
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