The Life of Poet John Keats – a Tragic Angel

Every so often a tragic angel walks this earth. A sorrowful but passionate soul who cannot accept ambiguity and social conventions, instead demanding to experience a pure and ideal life of beauty. But unfortunately this world does not offer such ideals, leaving these souls in a sad conflict between their inner and outer worlds. They are willing to achieve their goal at all costs, until the outer world of society inevitably punishes them for it. This tragic awareness of death creates a sense of urgency, one that allows them to experience that ideal beauty, if only for one brief moment. They can accept dying young as long as they can preserve that ecstasy in art, thus cheating death and becoming immortal. The poet John Keats embodies this tragic search for truth and beauty.

Keats suffered tremendously in his short life; the early death of both his parents left him the eldest of the family at age fifteen. Keats death hung over him like a rain cloud waiting to pour, and this gave him a desperate sense of urgency to experience and produce extreme beauty. “O for a life of sensations rather than of thought,” Keats wrote in a letter to a peer. Keats believed that a life full of thought was one full of sorrow, a tragic quality that can be found in many of his poems. One such example is his early piece, “Sleep and Poetry,” in which he attempts to preserve the beautiful qualities of nature that he so admires. He does this to capture those physical moments of beauty and place them in the ideal world of art. The poem begins with Keats vision of a poet’s ideal life.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in Poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.

Keats then goes on to describe all the fanciful pleasures he would enjoy living a poetic life full of pleasurable sensations. A life that he tragically accepts as impossible in this world, evident as the poem progresses.

Yet, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts;

This shows Keats’ tragic qualities in that he searches for truth in the imagination and through poetry, not allowing himself to be restricted by reason and conventions. At the same time he accepts the fact that this world is one full of suffering, thus making his search an endless one. That is, until, his untimely death at the age of twenty-four. But for Keats the search for beauty is what makes him a poet, thus implying that once he has found it he seizes to be a poet. Thus one can argue that Keats found the beauty he was looking for and made it immortal in his poems, ending his existence as a poet thus ending his life. Keats achieves, through poetry, that sublime, ideal beauty that is worth dying for. This is tragic in the sense that the only way he can achieve that state he so desires is to trade his life for it. Even more tragic yet, that he seemed willing and happy to do it.