How can we know the dancer from the dance?
     --William Butler Yeats

John Keats saw life with an intensity and a maturity unequalled by any other Romantic poet. Capturing life's complexities in a richly sensuous style, he concerned himself with how man can find beauty in a world of ugliness and evil without losing his integrity.

At times in his earlier poems he could heartily welcome these opposing elements, as we can see in his "Fragment: Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow":

Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,
    Lethe's weed and Hermes' feather;
Come to-day, and come to-morrow,
    I do love you both together!
    I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;
    Fair and foul I love together. (1-7)

But these oppositions could also fill him with the painful anxiety seen in "God of the Meridian":

To thee my soul is flown,
    And my body is earthward press'd.--
It is an awful mission,
A terrible division:
And leaves a gulph austere
To be fill'd with worldly fear. (3-8)

While these examples are clearly from lesser works, they are useful in showing the framework upon which Keats's later, more important works are based. From the poems of his Scottish walking tour and the great odes to his last completed poem, "Lamia," he continues to return to these conflicts.

In addition to the sheer beauty of the poetry, it is his vacillation in the face of these conflicts that continues to evoke a sense of immediacy in modern readers. As we find ourselves caught up in the dizzying dance of life--"Dancing music, music sad, / Both together, sane and mad"--we, too, are hesitant to arrive at any conclusions with certainty. We, too, are at odds to find an adequate resolution to the painful, and often tragic, dialectic by which we are held captive. How often do we labor futilely to escape the miseries of life, to find, as W. B. Yeats put it, a place where the "body is not bruised to pleasure soul / Nor beauty born out of its own despair"?

The Great Odes
Between January and September of 1819, Keats wrote most of his masterworks. Among these are the odes which are included in your reading. They are linked together by Keats's attempt to understand the nature of reality.

In them, Keats writes with a mature detachment, something which he referred to as Negative Capability. Walter Jackson Bate defines this quality in his excellent critical biography John Keats (Belknap, 1963):

In our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain everything . . . what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness. This, however, involves negating one's ego. . . . For a "great poet" especially, a sympathetic absorption in the essential significance of his object . . . "overcomes every other consideration." (249-50)

As you read the short introductory headnote in your anthology note what is said of Keats's accomplishments:

What he might have done is beyond conjecture; what we do know is that his achievement, when he stopped writing at the age of twenty-four, greatly exceeds the accomplishment at the same age of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton. (826)

^© Scott Foll 2000. All rights reserved.