Keats essay

The Romantic poets who preceded Keats, such as Coleridge and Byron, had also been preoccupied with condemning the evils of the modern age of industry, and extolling the virtues of nature as its opposite.

John Keats was born to Frances Jennings Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats were both unconventional men during their era. They were both part of the romantics, poets who sought nature as a way of expressing their most bare and intimate feelings.

The poem beautifully suggests a before and after moment. In a deft fifteen lines, the poem uses the image of light as water as a vehicle for literal and metaphorical reflection. By focussing on immediate experiences, the poem moves deftly from “something” to “nothing”.

The primary theme of the poem has been described by critics Samuel C. Chew and Richard D. Altick (1948) as "the quest of a unity transcending the flux of the phenomenal world."