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Keats
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and completing the poetic journey he had begun. However, by the
age of 25, he had written a major body of work containing some of
the most memorable poems in the English language. Keats’s bestknown
poetry was composed twenty years after the publication of
Lyrical Ballads and, although his poetry contrasts with that of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, they remained an important influence on
his work and his theories of poetry.
A main theme of Keats’s poetry is the conflict between the everyday
world and eternity: the everyday world of suffering, death and decay, and
the timeless beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination.
His earliest poetry consists mainly of long poems, some of them epic in
style and concept. Endymion (1818) is written in four books and is derived
in style and structure from Greek legends and myths, the main theme
being the search for an ideal love and a happiness beyond earthly possibility.
A more ambitious long poem is The Fall of Hyperion (1819) which is heavily
influenced by John Milton and was not finished by Keats, in part because
he wished to develop his own style and identity as a poet. It tells of the
downfall of the old gods and the rise of the new gods who are marked by
their strength and beauty. Although the poem has been criticised for a lack
of control in the writing, there are several places where sensuousness and
precision of rhythm and image are combined:
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
(Hyperion)
Keats continued to write long narrative poems which allowed him
to develop a characteristic feature of the style of all his poems: lush,
sensuous imagery which supports precise descriptive detail. Keats,
like Coleridge, was also attracted to exotic settings for his narratives.
These include mythic classical backgrounds and mediaeval contexts
of high Romance. The poems Isabella, Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes
and La Belle Dame Sans Merci explore familiar Romantic themes: the
relationship between emotion and reality; the impermanence of human
love; the search for an elusive beauty. Unlike poets and philosophers
of the classical, eighteenth-century period, who saw the mediaeval