English 12 / Unit 4: Romantic Poets
4.4 Keats and Shelley
Notes
John Keats (1795 to 1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 to 1822) belong to the second generation of Romantic poets.
- Keats valued beauty and sensory detail and wrote odes. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ends: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'" His idea of negative capability is the ability to accept uncertainty without grasping for fixed answers.
- Shelley wrote of rebellion and change. In "Ozymandias," a traveler describes a broken statue in the desert: "'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains." The poem's irony is that a king's boast now stands in ruins.
- "Ode to the West Wind" ends with the hopeful question "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
Practice
What is ironic about the inscription on the statue in "Ozymandias"?
The boast of greatness stands against a desert of "nothing beside remains."
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the urn's final message is "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." This idea most nearly means:
Keats suggests that art captures a truth that lasts.
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" is best read as:
Winter and spring symbolize hardship and renewal.
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