Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

118The Poetry of John Keatsas transcending evil and thereby offering reassurance in a tragic world.A tragic character—like Manfred, Cain, or Beatrice—may contributeto this reassurance through some sort of moral triumph over death,but moral triumph on the part of a character is not necessary to thetragic sublime. All that is necessary is that the mind—of reader orspectator—simultaneously create, test, and accept a version of truth sofirm that, in Keats’s words, it is also beautiful. Thus tragedy defamiliarizesfamiliar pain.IVBefore going on to Keats, it is hardly practical or necessary to examinemany more Romantic poets or critics. But it may help clarify the tragicsublime to mention Richard Payne Knight and Shelley. Tragedy issublime, said Knight, but neither tragedy nor any other work of arthas much to do with morality. Knight did not recognize a faculty likeHazlitt’s reasoning imagination which can comprehend large designsof thought and feeling. What an audience enjoys is only the vigor andenergy of tragic emotions. 24 Knight’s amoral sublime leaves the tragicdisagreeables outside the theater; the tragic sublime always puts themon stage.Shelley’s sublime is neither amoral nor always tragic. Sublimity,in Shelley’s most general sense, seems to mean loftiness in beautyand virtue. Shelley applies the word so sparingly to specific pieces ofliterature that his discovery of the sublime in Antigone, Oedipus theKing, Oedipus at Colonus, King Lear, and “the dramatic poem entitledJob” is worth noting. 25 Unfortunately his comments on these tragediesinclude little analysis. We do know that Shelley ranked tragedyabove other kinds of poetry in breadth of moral power and that heregarded virtue and beauty as equally reflective of eternal oneness. 26Furthermore, the prefaces to Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci recalltwo distinctions already encountered in this article: first, Dennis’s andWordsworth’s between “enthusiastic” and “dramatic” imagination and,second, Hazlitt’s between the “ideal” and the “dramatic.” In PrometheusUnbound Shelley proposes “to familiarize the highly refined imaginationof the more select classes of poetical readers with the beautifulidealisms of moral excellence.” 27 Prometheus is not a tragic character.After Act III, scene iii, the poem celebrates his immortality andimmutability. Whether or not the closing scenes sustain this vision of