Imagery in Keats Work In order to perceive the images in Keats work, the readers have to employ all their

physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, and movement. Keats often combines different senses in one image, that is, he attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice called synaesthesia. His synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect,and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of different happenings, the unicity of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these images the product of his unrivaled ability to absorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects. Keats Theory of Negative Capability Keats explored the idea of negative capability in several of his poems from 1819: La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad, Ode to a Nightingale, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, Ode on a Grecian Urn. Negative capability is a theory about a state of intentional open-mindedness in which the human being accepts uncertainty and the unresolved. Elsewhere he called it Humility and the capability of submission. Keats expressed it in a letter to his brothers George and Tom dated Sunday, 21 December 1817. He said: The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved and that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. In other words, the term refers to that contented state in which the human being accepts that not all answers are available to the human mind. This attitude of serene acceptance comes through quite strongly in a poem like the Ode To Autumn. In the absence of absolute certitude, truth must give precedence to Beauty. Keats argues in another letter that the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. He also maintained that I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Hearts affections and the truth of Imagination--What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth. And in Ode on a Grecian Urn he utters the famous phrase: Beauty is truth, truth beautythat is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.