From your reading so far what seems to be Keats’s chief strengths and preoccupations?
At the time when John Keats was born it was said that, ‘poets are born, not made.’ Poets at the time were either gentlemen from the upper class, or well educated with intellectual backgrounds. Keats’s background, at the time, was definitely of the lower classes; he did not have any social advantages that many of his contemporary poets took for granted. As well as this, there was nothing, in his early life that was suggestive of his poetic talent. He had to be a self-made poet.
Keats grew up in a time of upheaval in every way, a time of new political thinking, of social and humanitarian reform, a revolutionary time that had earlier spawned the French Revolution which in turned had strengthened the will to change everywhere in the early nineteenth century. These times brought with them the Romantic Movement. Romanticism was a rebellion. It was a reaction against the stiff views of poetry in the previous century, where technique was prized higher than inspiration and common sense higher than passion.
The popular poetry of the period was over decorated and given to telling uninspired entertaining little tales. The poetic accent wasn't Romantic, it was 'romanticized'. Keats wanted to be distinguished from the ‘Romanticism crowd.’ Romantic poets could not escape being affected by the tendencies of their time and Keats certainly had his love for women, especially Fanny Brawne. However, in romanticized poetry the English countryside was a pastoral idyll. It was a place of great oaks looming above soft turf, warm sunlight or soft moonlight, brooks and great flower banks. While in reality it was a place of thigh deep mud, filthy animals, oppressed illiterate workers living no better than their animals and doing gruesome work in all weathers. However, a good deal of the fashionable romanticized poetry found its way into Keats's poetry too, especially in his early poems, with his lack of coherence and rhyming lead to him being overlooked by critics; his early attempts at writing long poems had failed. Much of this romanticism came about because of Keats’s exposure to the work of a minor poet named Leigh Hunt. Keats picked up more of the Huntian style than his immature poetry could carry.
