The beauty of pallor : death in Keats's poems and letters

Abstract

The Beauty of Pallor attempts to capture the precariousness conditioning the life of one of the greatest of the second generation Romantic poets, John Keats, in tracing the obsessive thought and expression of his consciousness fraught with an inextricableness of living and dying. My study is chronological to the poet's life to the extent that it is broadly dichotomised between his early mode of thinking (vaguely, 1817 to early 1818), and his later mode of thinking (late 1818 to 1819) and the respective works (letters and poems). Therefore, chapter 1 will focus almost exclusively on Keats's Romantic escapism enacted for the most part by his adolescent credence of the supremacy of beauty over an anguished awareness of an ephemeral reality; wherein I will explore the traits by which he weaves such a beauty through his poetic expression and correspondence. This will be ensued by the progression to the later more mature compositions, which will be dealt with, with more scrutiny and detail. Needless to say, the major reason for this is these works' conveyance of a profound perception of death that more than anything testifies to an amazing degree -- to the achievements of the poet. By this of course I am inferring to the great odes, and the quasi-sententious The Fall of Hyperion - the pivotal work, together with 'To Autumn', concerning the tragic sense of life. In this respect, allusions to other philosophers and poets - especially the Spanish master of tragic thought, Unamuno - will be constant, my persisting endeavour being to instigate further depths to Keats's mature stance- depths, which I hazard to say, have frequently been undermined and overlooked by the several critics I have consulted in preparation for this analysis. Specifically, what I intend to evoke in this work, is precisely Keats's writings as reflecting an existentiality placed painfully in a transitional state - that delicate, agonising border conjured out from a poignant awareness of a life with all its joys progressing fatedly to oblivion. To this end, I owe my immense gratitude to Thomas McFarland, whose critical texts have never ceased to stimulate and excite my insight whenever I engage with Keats's poetry, and that sweet sadness that emanates so profusely from them.