Critics on Keats

Critics on Keats

Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion rejects the long upheld idea that Keats was isolated from political and social issues, and wrote poems based purely in the style of his Romantic, sensual spirit. Motion argues that Keats "translated" political, philosophical and medical questions into immediate, general ideas in his poetry, just in a less obvious and direct way than his contemporaries did (like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly and Blake for example).
Motion believes that the parts of the human experience that Keats wrote about, which people have received as purely romantic for generations, were written in thoughtful response to the world around him.

http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/proved-upon-our-pulses-keats-in-context

Other critics

• Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts." eg his love for Fanny Brawne is likely to have inspired the thoughts expressed in 'Bright Star' and other works. 

•  "Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it." - Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling: 

• All written in May 1819, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy" grew out of "a persistent kind of experience which dominated Keats's feelings, attitudes, and thoughts during that time. Each of them is a unique experience, but each of them is also, as it were, a facet of a larger experience. This larger experience is an intense awareness of both the joy and pain, the happiness and the sorrow, of human life. This awareness is feeling and becomes also thought, a kind of brooding as the poet sees them in others and feels them in himself. This awareness is not only feeling; it becomes also thought, a kind of brooding contemplation of the lot of human beings, who must satisfy their desire for happiness in a world where joy and pain are inevitably and inextricably tied together. This union of joy and pain is the fundamental fact of human experience that Keats has observed and accepted as true. Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown