Maria Tariq BS English 4th

John Keats as a Poet of beauty:

Keats‟ Concept of Beauty/ „Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty‟.

Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a

passionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of
beauty constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature,
in woman and in art. For him, „A thing of beauty is a joy forever‟.

When we think of Keats, „Beauty‟ comes to our mind. Keats and Beauty have
become almost synonymous. We cannot think of Keats without thinking of
Beauty. Beauty is an abstraction; it does not give out its meaning easily. For
Keats, it is not so. He sees Beauty everywhere. Keats made Beauty his object of
wonder and admiration and he became the greatest poet of Beauty. With Keats
the passion for Beauty was the greatest, rather the only consideration. In the
letters of Keats, we frequently read about his own ideas about Beauty. In one of
his letters to George and Tom, he wrote:

He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats
is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty? He was the
most passionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of
many imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened
emotional appeal... He could see Beauty everywhere and in every object. Beauty
appeared to him in various forms and shapes in the flowers and in the clouds, in
the hills and rills, in the song of a bird and in the face of a woman, in a great
book and in the legends of old. Beauty was there in the pieces of stone with
carvings thereon. He hated didacticism in poetry. For the poetry itself was
beauty so he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” The
lines of his poem „Endymion‟ have become a maxim:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness”