The Two Worlds Of John Keats In His Great Odes

John Keats (1795--1821) was one of the greatest English Romantic Poets in the 19th century. Apart from his genius and creativity, Keats was a prolific poet who went on writing till he could breathe no more. During and after his life, three collections of his poems were published, leaving a precious legacy in the literary treasure of the world and exerting a far-reaching influence upon the art of poetry-composing. The study of Keats has been uninterrupted and many-directional, mainly focusing on the theme and its "social" meaning. Modern interest has placed the symbolic odes at the center, with their concentration mostly listed to the interpretation of the themes of the odes. Although some critics have noticed the existence of the two realms in Keats's works, they managed to escape the causes and the subject itself. This thesis therefore, attempts to concentrated on the two worlds—the real one and the ideal one, hoping to reveal the artistic charm of Keats's odes and to offer some inspiration and guidance to the study of modern poetry in terms of their creation and appreciation.This thesis mainly focuses on the two worlds in his odes from the following three aspects: first, the two worlds have many familiar labels. For example, earth and heaven, mortality and immortality, time and eternity, materiality and spirituality, the known and the unknown, the finite and the infinite, realism and romance, the natural and the supernatural. The actual world is the realm of mortals and is associated with mutability, natural process, and death, while the ideal world is the realm of gods and fairies and is associated most significantly with permanence—the absence of all that mutability, process, and death imply.Second, the two worlds, apparently, have certain relationship. In his great odes, Keats himself uses imagination abundantly to unite the two realms. The activity of the imagination inspires Keats to create his ideal world which arises from a heightened sense of external reality. It is a noticeable feature that in his odes the speakers usually begin with an awareness of the real world but fly to some higher or imaginative realm to grow away from the real world which is full of pains and sorrows, but he cannot completely break away from the reality, thus coming back to the earthly life.Third, by creating a ideal world totally different from the real one, Keats reveals his pursuit of the eternal beauty. Among the romantic poets, Keats was the least well educated, the humblest in class origin, and the shortest-lived. He suffered a lot during his short life, and all the goodness and sweetness in the real life was a beautiful dream for him. What he could do was put into his poems his beautiful meditations upon life—love, art, happiness, sorrow, and the natural world. The most eye-catching qualities of his odes lie in his vivid, tangible sensuousness and over-flowing, far-reaching sensuous imageries, thereby the most expressive and colorful worlds—the real world and the ideal one—have gained his special attention. In his odes, Keats described the eternal beauty in the ideal world while he demonstrated the many conflicts in the real one.