Similarities and Dissimilarities Between Shelley and Keats
Similarities and dissimilarities
Though P. B. Shelley and John Keats were mutual friends, but they have possessed the diversified qualities in their creativity. These two are the great contributors of English Literature, though their lifecycle were very short. Their comparison are also little with each other, while each are very much similar in thoughts, imagination, creation and also their lifetime.
01) Attitude towards the Nature
P. B. Shelley:
Whereas older Romantic poets looked at nature as a realm of communion with pure existence and with a truth preceding human experience, the later Romantics looked at nature primarily as a realm of overwhelming beauty and aesthetic pleasure. While Wordsworth and Coleridge often write about nature in itself, Shelley tends to invoke nature as a sort of supreme metaphor for beauty, creativity, and expression. This means that most of Shelley's poems about art rely on metaphors of nature as their means of expression: the West Wind in "Ode to the West Wind" becomes a symbol of the poetic faculty spreading Shelley's words like leaves among mankind, and the skylark in "To a Skylark" becomes a symbol of the purest, most joyful, and most inspired creative impulse. The skylark is not a bird, it is a "poet hidden."
John Keats:
Keats’s sentiment of Nature is simpler than that of other romantics. He remains absolutely influenced by the Pantheism of Wordsworth and P. B. Shelley. It was his instinct to love and interpret Nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of the sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. Keats is the poet of senses, and he loves Nature because of her sensual appeal, her appeal to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch.
Both men were great lovers of nature, and an abundance of their poetry is filled with nature and the mysterious magnificence it holds. Their attitudes towards the Nature are slightly difference. P. B.
Though P. B. Shelley and John Keats were mutual friends, but they have possessed the diversified qualities in their creativity. These two are the great contributors of English Literature, though their lifecycle were very short. Their comparison are also little with each other, while each are very much similar in thoughts, imagination, creation and also their lifetime.
01) Attitude towards the Nature
P. B. Shelley:
Whereas older Romantic poets looked at nature as a realm of communion with pure existence and with a truth preceding human experience, the later Romantics looked at nature primarily as a realm of overwhelming beauty and aesthetic pleasure. While Wordsworth and Coleridge often write about nature in itself, Shelley tends to invoke nature as a sort of supreme metaphor for beauty, creativity, and expression. This means that most of Shelley's poems about art rely on metaphors of nature as their means of expression: the West Wind in "Ode to the West Wind" becomes a symbol of the poetic faculty spreading Shelley's words like leaves among mankind, and the skylark in "To a Skylark" becomes a symbol of the purest, most joyful, and most inspired creative impulse. The skylark is not a bird, it is a "poet hidden."
John Keats:
Keats’s sentiment of Nature is simpler than that of other romantics. He remains absolutely influenced by the Pantheism of Wordsworth and P. B. Shelley. It was his instinct to love and interpret Nature more for her own sake, and less for the sake of the sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own workings and aspirations. Keats is the poet of senses, and he loves Nature because of her sensual appeal, her appeal to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch.
Both men were great lovers of nature, and an abundance of their poetry is filled with nature and the mysterious magnificence it holds. Their attitudes towards the Nature are slightly difference. P. B.