The Beautiful Symphony Of Jangling Discords

The life of Keats is one of misfortune. He cherished so many dreams for a better life but turned out to be mere hallucinations. The harsh reality frustrated him but never defeated him. The huge gap between aspiration and reality, strangely, became a forceful impetus encouraging the poet to pursue artistic beauty persistently: the more he suffered the more furiously he craved for a shelter in the artistic realm. Keats's poetics and poetry were maturing with his progressing understanding of life and ultimately fostered a particular aesthetic feature of his own.The introduction claims that the frequent paradoxes in Keats's poetics and poetry are incarnate inner confusion of the poet's as well as the place where the artistic charm lies after a literature review of Keats studies in the past years. Keats believed in the pure beauty deprived of all evils in the beginning of his creation while later adopted an objective way of recording the real world as it was, which indicates that he finally reached his heavenly shelter reconciling all the discords.The first part of the main body of the thesis discusses the influence of the poet's life experience on his creation from four aspects. Family, especially maternal love, cultivated his indecisive attitude towards women. For poetic career, he never enjoyed the fame he desired so much in his lifetime and thus wrote "here lies one whose name was writ in water" as his epitaph. Besides, the unexpected consumption shadowed him all the time and attributed for his craving for immortality. Finally, his love affairs and never-happened marriage also stimulated his creation. All the sufferings in life serve as the impetus intensifying his craving for artistic beauty.Part Two attaches great importance to the aesthetic ideas in several important poetic theories of Keats. Empathy emphasizes active acceptance, eliminating self and projecting into others. Negative capability focuses on recording the real world as an on-looker and believes that all the conflicts could reconcile in the poetic beauty. The "three axioms" of poetry stress naturalness, objecting Wordsworthian egotism. More important is his truth theory evolving with his changing reliance on imagination. Among all these ideas, Keats always insisted on the never-changing self-annihilation.Part Three attends to Keats's poetry. The sensuous beauty and final apotheosis in "Endymion" illustrates that the poet was painfully seeking a consolatory bower in transcendence. Whereas, in "Lamia" and the odes, he vacillated between reality and beauty, and finally opted for a world harmonizing both. By describing pains in poetry, Keats reached his dream of perfect consolation-the paradoxical beauty reconciling all the conflicts.The conclusion emphasizes that the self-denying theories and paradoxical poems demonstrate Keats's aesthetics: artistic beauty could conciliate anything conflicting in actuality. His brave confrontation with the pains in life does not mean that he found any beauty in suffering, but rather that he believed the intensity of poem which would provide unimaginable comfort to any exhausted and exiling soul.