Keat's Aestheticism: A Critical Study

Romanticism was a combination of Aestheticism and Mysticism . Reduced to its most quintessential form mysticism is the direct apprehension of God and the experience of communion with him. The Romantic poets wanted to peer beyond the visible world because they felt that the visible world was a veil beyond which lay the world of the Real and the Eternal. Keats’s desire like the other Romantics was to draw upon all sources of Beauty and Wonder including works of the Hellenic and Medieval and the Renaissance periods. On the poets of the 19th century England as also on Keats Oriental mysticism had made a deep impact. Keats had clearly equated Beauty with Truth and Truth being identical with Beauty. It was indicative of the unified vision for the perception of truth. The cult of Beauty for Keats had an obvious oriental flavour in it. To every Indian familiar with the Eastern concept of Beauty so well expressed in Satyam Shivam Sundaram there is a remarkable similarity in it with Keats’s magnificent expression of his abiding faith in Beauty being Truth. The present study of Keats’s Aestheticism makes a comprehensive analysis of the profound affinity between the identical concepts. The conscious seeker of Beauty that Keats was he was all the time striving to climb the ladder of aesthetic experience and go to the very top so that he may see the reality and see beyond the material world. He was aware that the veil had to be removed in order to see the ultimate Reality.