The Eternal Flame: Analyzing the Timeless Poetry of P.B. Shelley and John Keats

The Romantic age is sometimes called the age of Revolution too in the history of English literature. The American Revolution and the Spirit of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity of the French Revolution made it a time of hope and change. Literary writers of this age followed Romanticism. 

Romanticism was an imaginative movement in the arts and literature. It was founded in the 18th century and centered on inspiration, imagination, subjectivity, and individual primacy. It was a Reaction to Classicism which focused on Reason. 

Romanticism focused on imagination and excessive emotions and these are the chief characteristics of the Romantic age. Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Lord Byron is a famous and best romantic poet of this era.

Shelley belongs to the later Romantic period and one of the best romantic poets in the history of English literature. He was born in 1792. He was a great Revolutionary and idealist poet. Shelley's literary works reveal all the characteristics of the Romantic age, such as love for beauty and nature, love for freedom, strong imagination, supernaturalism, Hellenism, Melancholy, and Idealism. Like the other Romantic poets, Shelley was also an ardent lover of nature. 

Shelley treats Nature as one spirit and the Supreme Power working through all things. He celebrates Nature in his main poems such as The Cloud, To a Skylark, To the Moon, Ode to the West Wind.

Imagination is also a distinctive feature of romantic poets. Shelley calls poetry "the expression of imagination" because, in it, different things can be brought together in harmony instead of being separated through analysis. Melancholy occupies a prominent place in romantic poetry. Shelley represents himself in his poems as a man of ill luck, subject to evil and suffering.

The use of supernatural machinery in poetry is also characteristic of Romantic poetry. In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", Shelley looks for ghosts and wants to say that ghosts are one of the ways men have tried to interpret the world beyond. 

The world of mythology in classical Greece was important to Romantic poets. Shelley wrote "Hellas". Hellas is actually the ancient name of Greece and he also wrote "Ozymandias", which is an ancient Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt. Shelley was very much influenced by Platonism. 

Plato believes that the supreme power in the universe is the spirit of beauty. Shelley borrowed this concept from Plato and used it in his metaphysical poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty".

Love for Beauty is another element of Romanticism and Shelley used it in his poetry. Beauty, to Shelley, is an ideal force of the beauty of Nature and he calls it "Intellectual Beauty". He celebrates beauty as a mysterious power.

Idealism is another characteristic of Romanticism and it can be defined as the practice of forming or pursuing ideals, especially unrealistically. Idealism can be seen in the poetry of second-generation Romantic poets. Revolutionary, Religious, and Erotic idealism are the three subcategories of Shelley's idealism. 

Shelley's lyrical style is romantic as well and maybe compared to William Wordsworth's in several ways. Shelley used a lot of powerful symbolism and imagery, especially visual imagery. His choice of diction is lush and tactile, but he never used any ornamental words in his poetry.

                                    

                                                           

Like P.B Shelley, John Keats is also a renowned best Romantic poet of English literature. He was born in 1795. John Keats was a passionate Romantic poet. He did not describe any social and political problems of his age. He believes that "if poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves of a tree, it should not come at all."The poetry of Keats is enriched with a keen interest in beauty and nature with sensuous imagery which appeals to our senses. He is Hellenistic and an escapist. He pondered about death, love, and heroism, in addition to his fascination with beauty. His main themes, with a "Negative Capability," have been adventure and sadness.

Keats was very much influenced by ancient Greek mythology. Keats had a deep interest in the writings of Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and Virgil. "Ode to Grecian Urn" is a perfect example of Keats’s love for Greeks. A Greek artist sculpted some images on the urn, and Keats explains them implicitly as immortal paintings that will never die. He found "grandeur" and "calm" in Greek art, as well as symmetry and simplicity, and, finally, a sense of proportion.

Escapism makes John Keats a Romantic poet. Whenever he fails to face the harsh realities of life, he finds pleasure in his imagination, where he creates a world of his own. For example, "Ode to Nightingale", is a perfect example of his capability of escapism. In this poem, he creates an imaginative world in which he enjoys sweet nightingale songs that bring peace and calm to his mind and harmony to his soul.

Keats' imagination heightens the value of beauty, and he goes beyond the senses in his imagination. He speaks about things he has never encountered before in his life. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty –that is all ye on earth," he writes in his poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and he continues, "An object of beauty is a delight eternally." As a result, he was a big admirer of beauty.

Romantic poetry is the product of the fusion of two faculties; sensibility and imagination. Romantic writers tried to awaken the imagination of the reader to the reality that lies behind them and to rouse him from the dead and dull routine of customs, and make him conscious of the implicit mysteries of life. Shelly and Keats tried well to awaken the imagination of readers and their works represent all the characteristics of the Romantic age.