Keats concern with British Emp

A detailed Summary of Keats concern with British Emp


When I first studied Romanticism, I didn't think that the works of Locke and Berkeley could have influenced this artistic movement. Indeed romantic poets, such as John Keats, reveal their concerns with the British Empiricist. Claims that the external world, which constituted the content of poetry before the 17th century, altered. John Keats in his poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn" reflects this reaction by turning inward to the attractive domain invulnerable to philosophic speculations.

Midway in the 17th century John Locke criticized the naive notion of perception and started the philosophical movement known as British Empiricism. He stated that knowledge comes from experience. He had a different opinion from the Continental Rationalists about where knowledge starts: the Rationalists thought that knowledge


In the second stanza Keats says that "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter" (11-12); the "heard melodies" come from the senses, whereas those "unheard" ones are created by the imagination. The poem starts from the physical urn and then Keats turns inwards making the rest of the poem an illustration of "unheard melodies"; Keats works on his imagination trying to explain the pictures on the urn.

On the urn there are represented several images of life scenes. From these, Keats imagines the hidden story and recreates in his imagination the events happened on the representation. The images described become immortal because they are frozen in time: thus the lover cannot kiss the maiden he pursues, although their love will last forever, along with the "happy boughs", which will never she

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 544
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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