It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded.

Wordsworth himself goes on to isolate certain aspects of earlier poetry and avoid them carefully. These become the other element as far as Romantic poetry is concerned.

If we go back to Elizabethan times, we will perhaps come across the concept of the other for the first time in the pastoral tradition, where we find the juxtaposition of the country against the city or the court. There the country stands for everything idyllic. This contradiction is continued in the Restoration and Neo-Classic ages. The bucolic constitutes the other as far as urban literature is concerned. The former allows the emotions to have ample room whereas the latter encourages active cerebration. In the Neo-Classic age this conflict became more pronounced and extreme. By this time, country life had become a symbol of unrestrained emotion and unrefined behaviour, as opposed to that practised in the rational and fashionable Court representing the city. The Romantics, picking up the cue from Rousseau, emphasized nature, as it was seen as reflecting the feelings of men, and preferred the other of the earlier ages. Keats did not rebel against this movement. Keats’s motive was simple. He wanted to present and evaluate life and art, with a point of view which was essentially different from that of the other major Romantic poets. His aim was to write poetry with rationality and objectivity, that is, urbanity. Thus he moved towards a goal which had become the other as far as the Romantics were concerned.

From his earliest poetry, just like Wordsworth, Keats too finds nature the inspirer of poetry. Though nature is the principal ‘Muse’, it is more like the first stage in Wordsworth's relationship with nature than that which he developed later. Keats’s nature was an appetite, a feeling and a love, but there was a need of a remoter charm, not through deliberation, but through sensations themselves.

Keats’s sensuousness was something different from the other Romantic poets. No other poet was as familiar to pain as Keats was. This familiarity came from an early fear of death and the later apprenticeship as a doctor’s apothecary. In the hospital Keats’s job was to dress up wounds and attend the operations. The doctor he worked under was notorious for his incompetence, and thus death on the operation table was to Keats a common experience. Also the age being that of before the discovery of anaesthesia the operations themselves were terribly painful affairs, and dressing up wounds acquainted Keats with blood and raw flesh. So to Keats death and pain were not abstract ideas. Thus one can see why Keats’s concern with pain was as much physical as it was metaphysical. And this perhaps gave him the unique capacity to view pain objectively.

As pleasure is commonly accepted as the absence of pain, to Keats pleasure became something very closely related to physicality. From the very beginning we see this streak of the domination of senses in his poetry. Whereas to Wordsworth and Coleridge senses were the first steps in their search for the ultimate design, and through which they passed on to the beyond, Keats could go past the obvious boundaries of the senses. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ we see Keats putting a richly sensuous experience against all the ugliness death and sickness can offer. In the fifth stanza of the poem, Keats attains a tranquillity rarely found in any poetry, through his poetry he is capable of reaching the nightingale and its immortal state of bliss. Keats can juxtapose the fading violets with the coming musk-rose.

With his high sensuousness Keats was always on the lookout for beauty. Beauty not only of nature but that inherent in all things. The pure delight with beauty remains with him clearly until Endymion. The first lines of the poem proclaim revolt from the world of the commonplace in which he lives and he resolves to find it in the loveliness of unstained nature, and in the great stories of the world of chivalry. He begins:

Very soon Keats’s idea of beauty takes on a new meaning. To him beauty becomes a symbol of the eternal as against our transient existence, and thus it becomes truth, as he proposes in the last two lines of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. And in Hyperion he discusses in more detail the idea of beauty in all things.

Beauty here equals the mythical divine essence which resides in all things and makes everything beautiful, the divine essence of poetic inspiration, and the ultimate truth. In his famous ‘Negative Capability’ letter, Keats writes:

... the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth ... [December 21, 1817]

When the fully functioning imagination cooperates with the object being experienced, it manages to seize the complexion of the item so vividly that all the irrelevant associations and qualities vanish. This is achieved by the fusion of the object and the mind. Truth and Beauty at this moment not only spring into being, but also begin to coalesce into one another. Truth is basically the human agreement with external reality. In the experience described the commonly overlooked physical reality is not dissected and abstracted into factual existence, but has awakened into what we call Truth by human recognition of its wholeness. With its irrelevant portions ‘evaporated’, it becomes ‘true’, simultaneously its dawning into unity becomes Beauty. Keats wrote about this in his previous letter [to Benjamin Bailey]:

This is what occurs to Keats when he experiences the Grecian Urn. The existence reflected may be oppressive, even cruel, but the harmony with truth can be discerned in the continuous matching of human intuition with the emerging reality at every stage. According to Coleridge truth comes after intellectual and philosophical speculations. Keats’s conception was absolutely different from this.

The idea of appetite remains. Keats was inspired in his sensuousness from Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers. The concept of power as linked to appetite is somewhat different in Shakespeare. Whereas Shakespeare was critical of the overpowering appetite which removed all other concerns, Keats indulged in it. In Troilus and Cressida, the audience and the Greeks, through Ulysses, are warned against such an attitude (I. iii, 119-124). Shakespeare feels that appetite even for beauty links up to power and it makes the senses overcome moral judgement. Keats does not disagree, only, he feels that perhaps such should be the case as far as the artist is concerned.

This is found in the earlier letter written on December 21, 1817, to George and Thomas Keats:

No one pattern or expression can explain everything. What is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity, grasping the idea of Beauty and Truth, can accept reality in its complete and diverse tangibility. This calls for the negation of one’s own ego. Keats criticized his friend Dilke saying that he will never find truth because he always runs after it. Keats writes: ‘The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts ...’ The ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ is the assertion of the egotistical conception of identity and the rejection of the insights which are attained through this openness. We should repudiate the need to extend our identities and rationalize our ‘half-knowledge’. For a ‘great poet’ the sympathetic absorption in the essential significance of his object, caught and relished in the active cooperation of the mind in which the emerging Truth is conceived as Beauty, overcomes, and even obliterates, all other considerations.

All these speculations mark only the beginning, the beginning of Keats’s own self-negation, in the previous letter he had already recorded his first such experiences,

But these thoughts did not yet have a rigid direction and they merely hint at the concept of disinterestedness. Yet even then Keats’s capacity for sympathetic identification was striking. While describing something he would cease to be merely a spectator and start taking part in the action, becoming one of the participators. His habitual capacity for identification is reflected in his poetic development. In the letter written in October 1818, Keats says,

He goes on to say how he becomes different people. He did not pick up the styles of different predecessors in mechanical emulation, but as a fellow partaker who identifies with the author and the author’s aims. But the same cannot be said of Otho the Great. Though it may serve as an instance of negative capability — Keats only wrote, rather translated, the speeches in verse. Brown supplied all else. He enquired about the plot only before taking up the last act.

These expressions find concrete representation in his maturer poetry. More than any other poet of his age he had the power to externalize his experience, of finding the adequate symbol for his feelings, instead of merely describing them. This can be best elucidated by the ‘Ode to Autumn’, its final three lines express the supreme realization of his life without the slightest sign of any effort. Here we see his self entirely submerged in the external world. This element is different from the senior Romantic poets as they perceived the external world as a projection of the self

Perhaps it is in the ‘Ode to Autumn’ that Keats comes nearest to his ideal of disinterestedness. Slowly Keats endeavoured to acquire this quality in his own poetry. But life itself was coming between his ideal and his work. Difficulties for everyone everywhere were occurring all the time to which he was ignorant, realizing this he writes, ‘I perceive how far I am from any humble standard of disinterestedness.’ Keats gives a comparison between Man and Hawk, stressing the instinctive nature of both. Yet in the midst of this continuum of impulsive life Keats finds instances of this strange and precious human capacity to grow towards disinterestedness. He muses further on that there may be superior beings to whom our reasoning would seem animal-like yet amusing, as animal-logic is to us, and he concludes that poetry is something lesser than philosophy This is the intrinsic part in the next development of Keats’s thought.

The idea of the poet’s development, his duty, his mission, was an ideal which both attracted and repelled Keats. He could not help disliking the idea that the poet must be a prophet. But it was hard for Keats to escape from such a notion of the poet’s goal, especially in the age of active humanitarianism. He wrote to Taylor on April 24, 1818, he wanted to do ‘some good for the world’. He further comments that he will endeavour to do so through study and thought and application. Keats did not have the refined educational background the other Romantics had, and at this period it seemed to him that a knowledge of established philosophy was essential for his poetry.

But this was an analysis of his own feeling of inadequacy. In a previous letter he had written:

I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity — it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance. [February 27, 1818]

Not only is it a departure from the Wordsworthian theory in its identification with the reader’s thoughts, but it also presupposes the impersonality of the poet. His speculations take him to a position where he cannot reconcile Art and Life. This conflict is presented in Lamia and in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Perfect Art cannot exist in this reality, and those who had tasted artistic perfection cannot reconcile themselves to this world either. Keats’s aim becomes to present the human condition in all its splendour and pathos, and he is transformed merely into the observer looking even at himself with objectivity.

This attitude goes blatantly against that of the senior Romantic poets. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge stressed the moralistic ‘duty’ of the poet. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth writes, that each poem in the book is ‘distinguished’ because each has a purpose. And according to Coleridge the purpose of poetry is to communicate truth. He specifically considered pleasure, that is absence of purpose, to be an unfit aim of poetry. Keats rebels against any such dominating doctrine:

For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egoist ... We hate poetry which has a palpable design upon us. [February 3, 1818]

He defines the poetical character as something which

has no self — it is everything and nothing — It has no character — It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon Poet. [October 27, 1818]

   However much may he stand apart from the tradition of the senior Romantic poets, he was a Romantic at heart. Imagination to him was of the utmost importance. And if not always the poet himself, poetry was his primary concern. He departed no more than, say, Byron; and this presence of the Other element, as it can be found in all the Romantic poets, is, paradoxically, in itself a Romantic quality because it rejects all rigidity.

Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats

D. J. Enright and Ernst De Chickera, English Critical Texts

Letters of John Keats, selected by Frederick Page

Cedric Watts, A Preface to Keats