John Keats: “Priesthood in Literature”                     

John Keats (1795-1821) was the son of a livery-stable keeper in England. An orphan at the age of 15, he devoted his short life to poetry, instead of joining a medical career.

 Inspired and encouraged by his friends Leigh Hunt, and Haydon, the painter, Keats was able to publish a volume of  Poems (1817), Endymion (1820), Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems.

           Most of the critics were very hostile towards his poetry, and this unjust criticism, as has been said by several critics, caused his death, but this does not seem to be the truth. The soul of Keats was not so fragile or weak. Matthew Arnold reminds us that the soul of Keats was made of “flint”. He is one of the few English poets, who has often been compared with Shakespeare.

His great Odes were written in 1819. Afflicted with consumption, he left for Italy, and died in Rome in 1821.  

Keats’ fame rests on his delicately marvelous Odes- To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, On Melancholy, To Autumn, and immortal sonnets On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, When I have Fears, and Bright Star. His Odes are marked by the perfectly rounded wholeness of  highly imaginative, enchantingly sensuous and pictorial phrases:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

…           …

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

                                                              -Ode to a Nightingale

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian …

                                                              -Ode on a Grecian Urn

Adoration of Beauty was like religion for Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Ode on a Grecian Urn).

Keats strongly feels that Beauty is supreme Truth, discovered and created by imagination; the logical reasoning fails to find Beauty. Keats’ “priesthood in literature” deserves admiration by all.