#Escapism of Keats # Keats’ View of Reality and Imagination # Contrast Between Reality and Imagination, Between Art and Reality the Word Escapist Is Often Entitled to the Name of Keats Because of His Escaping Tendency (

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#Escapism of Keats # Keats’ view of reality and imagination # Contrast between reality and imagination, between art and reality The word escapist is often entitled to the name of Keats because of his escaping tendency (from the real world to an imaginative world). Having been experienced from the bitter realities of his life, wherever he sees some beautiful pictures depicted on an ‘Urn’ or hears the song of a nightingale, he tries to dip into or to fly to an ideal world of happiness, beauty, music and imagination (through his ‘viewless wings of Poesy’), forgetting his reality in the world. But this little moment of pure happiness does not last long; he is to come back to this world again. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an excellent example of Keats’ escapism in his poetry. Keats’ escape is from his real life to an imaginative and ideal world. But why is this escape from the inevitable place? – Because, according to Keats, reality of human life is full of suffering, pain etc; this world is not a desirable place. He has summed up his individual as well as common sufferings of life in the following lines of stanza 11 of the poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes, Or, new love pine at them beyond tomorrow. Here he remembers the bitterness of his own life and reminds us that of our life. He considers that life is full of misery, sorrow and disease, of tiring struggle, of restlessness and pain; that life is nothing but a series of groans and complaints; that old men’s life is helpless and pitiful, having lost the control over their limbs and their hair being grey; that even the

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