Keats's Skepticism And Aestheticism

This thesis explains the relationship between Keats's skepticism on the one hand, and his aestheticism on the other. Ever since Matthew Arnold identified a tough-minded"flint and iron"1 in Keats's work alongside the more obvious tenderheartedness, critics have had to come to terms with these two essential qualities and their relationship. Despite all the divergent and sometimes incompatible attempts to characterize these two impulses, what they share is the assumption that the two impulses are not compatible, that they are fundamentally in conflict, which has become the most widely accepted view of Keats.The major purpose of this thesis is to define these two essential impulses in Keats more accurately in order to demonstrate that, far from being in tension, they are perfectly compatible, and that the most accurate way of understanding their relationship is to view them not as elements in conflict but as problem and solution. Keats's problem was how can a religious and metaphysical skeptic find a source of endurance and affirmation in a world of unavoidable suffering? And his solution to the problem posed by skepticism is what I shall be calling aestheticism, by which I mean what Keats calls the"principle of beauty in all things"2. This tenderhearted element in Keats springs directly out of the tough-minded and it involves neither escape nor visionary imagination, both of which Keats considered the blemish of the first generation of romantics. Instead, Keats develops a fully humanized faith in beauty, paradoxically rooted in skepticism and offered as an alternative not to the inescapably painful world but to the Christian response to that world.3To regard Keats's aestheticism as a kind of alternative to Christianity will inevitably arise disagreement, because many critics have largely ignored the religious concern and implications of Keats's work, due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and relationship of Keats's skepticism and aestheticism. What I hope to prove is that the two issues—his religious concerns and the relationship between his skepticism and aestheticism—are intimately connected. Not only can we better understand the nature and relationship of Keats's two fundamental impulses by considering them in the context of his religious concerns, but once we understand that relationship we can also see just how central religious issues are to Keats's poetic enterprise.What the author intents to do is challenging the widely assumption that Keats's two essential impulses are conflicting and arguing that Keats's religious concerns are central to his work, by means of reconstructing the view of life and poetry that Keats gives us unsystematically in his poems and letters. Specifically, I will in the first part examine the background of Romantic poetry, including the influences from political, economic as well as religious aspects. Then in Part two, I am going to explore the historical causes for Keats's profound skepticism, which is typically revealed in his attitudes toward religious as well as metaphysical truth. In Part three, the aesthetic solution for the problem of radical skepticism will be explained; I will also attempt to analyze Keats's interpretation of beauty and his technique of contrast. The fourth part is about the fulfillment of Keats's vision of life and poetry in his poetic career, readers will find Keats a great poet who knows what he is doing at a very early stage and consistently carries out his idea throughout his works. Conclusion will be made in the very last part, that Keats"give complete and powerful expression to the human longing for a better world"and at the same time to"remain faithful to the critical intelligence that forces us to acknowledge that dreams are only dreams and that in the sole world we know values are tragically in conflict"4 and thus Keats has sounded the music of humanity. The thesis attempts to prove that the characters of iron-flint and pet-lamb about Keats are not conflicting but unified in his unique understanding of life and poetry. Besides, suggestion on further study of the equation between beauty and truth will be proposed as well. Whether the thesis can do so must be determined by judging the validity of the arguments that follows.