Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats’s place is well established as a prominent poet in the second generation of British Romantic poets. The Romantic movement lasted from about 1800 to 1850 and was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion over the Enlightenment Period’s distanced rationalism. It competed with Neoclassicism, which coincided with the Enlightenment, and emphasized science and reason over emotion and individualism. Scholars consider the movement as beginning in 1798 with the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Romantic poets like Keats sought to explore and understand the sublime, the supernatural and the extraordinary, while their poetry engaged with the subjective human experience of passion, melancholy, and beauty.

Keats’s work draws both from Romantic tropes that were popular in the early 19th century and forges them as an emergent voice in the movement. William Wordsworth defined Romanticism as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and Keats’s poetic style relied heavily on the fusion of extreme emotion with natural imagery. Keats’s vivid and passionate poetry relied on and invoked all the human senses, presenting them in a combination that produced a heightened sensual effect.