“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”: Aestheticist Ideas in the Poetry of John Keats
“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”: Aestheticist Ideas in the Poetry of John Keats

Author(s): Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: John Keats; Walter Pater; Romantic poetry; Aesthetic Movement; Art for Art’s sake
Summary/Abstract: Aestheticism, with its emphasis on the present, its call for intensity of sensation and even excess, its preoccupation with momentary, transient beauty, gives expression to concerns which lie very much at the core of John Keats’s poetry. In the present essay I want to claim that Keats’s poetry is not merely aesthetic (concerned with the creation and experience of beauty) but primarily aestheticist. Hence, I endeavour to examine the complicated dialectic of temporality and permanence, of numbness and heightened sensitivity in Keats’s verse, the dialectic which is expressed persistently through language and images that Aestheticism will claim as its own a mere half-century after Keats’s death.

• Details
• Contents