JOHN KEATS : ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 

The Romantics took upon themselves the task of recovering art from what Bernstein has termed as “aesthetic alienation” - the separation of art from questions of truth and goodness.

No other poet felt the burden of art’s separation from truth and yet it’s commitment to being true and to being ethically uplifting than John Keats. While the other major Romantics were at times able to resolve this conflict with some level of confidence - Wordsworth in the sympathetic imagination, Coleridge in the unifying power of imagination, and Shelley in the role of the poet as the unacknowledged legislator of the world - Keats remained skeptical of the ability of poetry to bring truth, beauty, and goodness together in a state of unity. From his earliest poems to his latest, conflict between truth and beauty remains alive, even if for a moment in the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he was able to assert with confidence the unity of truth and beauty, though even here it is the Urn that speaks and not the poet. In his commitment to truth, which could be be ugly, and his commitment to beauty, which could be untrue, Keats discerned an ethical dilemma which he sought to resolve in his letters and poems. 

The consoling function of poetry required it to be true and beautiful at the same time, and where truth lay a restraining hand upon the flight of imagination in the creation of beauty, beauty demanded the freedom to roam in the world of creative imagination. In his insightful study of the conflict between constructive and destructive poetry in John Keats, Forest Pyle has made the point that the reason why Keats is unable to establish once and for all the truth - beauty unity is that poetic language cannot be tied to poetry’s ethical ends. 

According to Forest Pyle, The Fall of Hyperion is “perhaps Keats’s most sustained late reflection on the aesthetic and its relation to poetry”. In his poem the conflict between aesthetics and ethics is depicted in its most intense form. 

The Hyperion poems demonstrate that the topic of poetry’s relationship to ethics retains its force and its significance throughout Keats’s brief career; and they serve as the occasion for two of the strongest poems in the Romantic tradition. 

Keats never presumes that an aesthetic orientation leads to an ethical conclusion. Many of his best poems begin with aesthetics and ethics in a disjunctive relationship, a “ fierce dispute” that must be overcome; and the poems are compelled to revisit this disjunction over and over again. 

As Susan Wolfson states, “Keats was not after secure answers so much as the energy of thinking , testing and intensifying ideas”. On the contrary, Keats’s approach to poetry was based on what he defined as the ‘Negative Capability’, the ability to remain in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Didactic poetry was not something he aspired to compose. In fact, he was against this sort of poetry as he once wrote in a letter to JH Reynolds, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket”.

When the conflict of ethics and aesthetics is seen in the light of Keats’s concept of Negative Capability, some interesting conclusions can be drawn. Forest Pyle considers the conflict of ethics and aesthetics in Keats’s poetry in terms of a conflict between strength and weakness: “ The opposition between strength and weakness has from the beginning framed our understanding and evaluation of Keats; and it is an opposition that has governed every effort to fashion a narrative of the poet’s career”. 

Pyle sees in Keats a preference for weakness rather than strength, or the recognition that strength can be achieved in poetry only by way of weakness, and relates it to the concept of Negative Capability. 

Some of Keats’s ideas about the identity of the poet and his own creative experience may be helpful in responding to the questions. These ideas will then be related to certain ideas about creativity found in the writings of the school of criticism known as ‘deconstruction’, particularly in the work of Derek Attridge. 

According to Forest Pyle, the key words in Keats’s conceptualization of poetic creativity are ‘idleness’, ‘passivity’, ‘indolence’. These words have been interpreted as indicating a decadent aesthetic attitude in Keats, an attitude of avoidance of the hard moral questions that poetry and other arts are supposed to raise and respond to. 

Forest Pyle has summed up this fusion of ethics and aesthetics in Keats in the following statement: 

  Keats’s poetry of luxuriating indolence and blank amazement Keats’s weakness - makes no ethical claims and yet offers a kind of ethos that Barthes would call a “morality”. But when that fault - line is breached, when Keats makes his “ethical turn” the results are not the accommodation of the ethical with the aesthetic or the superseding of the latter by the former. Rather this is the place we encounter Keats’s radicalized aestheticism, the gift of an all - consuming poetry. 

John Keats’s concept of ‘Negative Capability’ is one concept which combines the ethical and the aesthetic approaches to poetry. The ethical concerns and aesthetic pleasures co - exist in Keats’s poetry and letters.