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Keats' Exploration of the Imagination - Online Paper

Keats' Exploration of the Imagination

“How the poetry of Keats explores the Romantic conception of the Imagination as a means to illuminate and transform human experience.”

Your speech must explore the ways in which the values of Romanticism in the late 18th century to the mid 19th century are inscribed in the set poems by Keats.

Without imagination, the Romantics considered that poetry was impossible, for it shaped their fleeting visions into concrete forms that we unhindered by the logic and reason. For Keats, the imagination was superior to reason and he used language to liberate and emphasize the beauty and wondrous use of the imagination, thus opposing the enslaving nature of reason.

Like all Romantic poets, ...

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but for the effect which they have on people.

Keats was born in 1795 during the first wave of Romanticism. The zenith of his poetic career came in 1819, during a period of acute personal distress and turmoil for Keats. Between January and September of that year he wrote his ‘Great Odes’, and La Belle Dame sans Merci.

The odes convey Keats’ concept of negative capability. This merging of the poet’s imagination with the mystery of nature creates a perspective from which he can begin to understand it. Keats also looks beyond the immediate reality of the physical into what he called the “truth of imagination,” claiming, “I describe what I imagine.” In a letter to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November 1817, he asserted: “The imagination can be compared to Adam’s dream- he awoke and found it truth.”

Dreams, then, provided an adjunct to the imagination in their exploration of the relationship between the ideal and reality. This point is reflected in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: “Beauty ...

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Keats' Exploration of the Imagination. (2011, April 16). Retrieved April 25, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Keats-Exploration-of-the-Imagination/98051

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 4/16/2011 03:33:35 AM
Submitted By: mimig123
Category: Poetry & Poets
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 804
Pages: 3

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