Discuss two characteristics of Romanticism in the Poetry of John Keats.

In this response to your question, I would like to comment on two characteristics of Romanticism in Keats's poetry:

1) Preponderance of imagination and feeling over intellect and

reason;

2) Sensuousness and pictorial quality.

I have chosen Keats's Ode to a Nightingale as the primary text for this dicussion.

The poem begins with an acute sensation of pain, paradoxically born of an excess of happiness induced by the song of the nightingale:

"My heart aches and a drowsy numbness

Pains my sense........."

As the feeling of pain subsides, the poet senses like gradually dissolving into forgetfulness:' one minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk '.

What follows from stanza 2 is the poet's desire to migrate to the beautiful world of the nightingale: the typically romantic desire to escape into an ideal world away from the agonies of the lived existence. It's an imaginative excursion for which neither the cool wine long-preserved underground, nor the fresh & hot wine of the South of France would be an appropriate/adequate mode of transportation. Hence the poet at last opts for 'the viewless wings of Poesy', i.e. the visionary flight of imagination to be identified with the bird, and 'fade far' into the dim dark forest.

The nightingale symbolises a remote world of beauty, and only imagination and feeling can lead the poet to that world. However, the word 'forlorn' tolls like a bell in line 70 to make the poet conscious of the limits of imagination and the pendulating return to the lived reality.

Keats is unique for his sensuousness and pictorial quality. His desire for a life full of sensations is wonderfully verbalised in his imagery and phrasing. Consider, for example, the graphically detailed out drinking vessel that he desires to be filled with 'warm South'. Colourful visual details seem to mythologise the 'beaker': ' full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene', 'the beaded bubbles winking at the brim' and 'the purple-stained mouth'. Further on, as the poet enters the deep dark forest with the bird, the fragrant interior full of the odours of the musk-rose, the violets, the white hawthorns, and the eglantines is imagined as an 'embalmed darkness'.

You can also look for similar romantic motif of a journey from the real to the imaginative, as well as romantic sensuous images in such poems as Ode to Autumn, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Bright Star and so on.