Keats | Context

What is Keats’s the Vale of Soulmaking?

• you can only express what you have experienced

• true understanding = experience = emotion

• you cannot convey the “truth” of something you have not experienced

• the soul is distinct from the intelligence/the rational part of ourselves

• the soul has to be formed by three influences which affect us during our lives

• it is necessary for us to experience the full range of human emotions in order to ‘school an intelligence and make it a soul’

• rationalising human suffering as a necessary learning experience which purifies the soul for the fulfilment of our life’s work

What three influences during our lives did Keats believe the soul has to be formed by?

• intelligence (your intellectual life, schooling, education)

• the human heart (our feelings/emotions)

• the world/experience (our experience of the world - the school of life)

negative capability

the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to reconcile its contradictory aspects, or fit it into closed and rational systems

What are the key ideas/aspects of Keats’s theory of negative capability?

• blissful ignorance

• joy in not knowing

• anti-rational

• life has a magical element

• the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science

• a great thinker is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’

• a poet has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated

• the inspirational power of beauty is more important than the quest for objective fact

• ‘‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’

When was the Romantic movement?

• late 18th - early 19th century

• following the French Revolution (1789)

What are the key ideas/aspects of Romanticism as a literary-historical classification?

• feeling or emotion are more important than logic, experience, or reason

• a quest for something greater

• opposition to rationalism and industrialism

• against the Enlightenment period

• search for connection to nature

• nature = God

• imagination connects us to God

• individualism

• ‘intellectual intuition’ - Coleridge

• inspiration

• emotions define the artist and the world

• idealism

• subjectivity

• chivalry

• courtly love

• melancholy

• lamentation

• an interest in the investigation of the self

• a yearning towards something transcendent, beyond the ordinary world

idealism

any theory that emphasises the spirit, the mind, or language over matter (the concept that we can make the world a better place)

What are the key aspects of the sublime?

• nature’s vast scale and scope

• overwhelming

• fear

• insignificance

• counteracts man’s hubris

• the Gothic