When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Romanticism is a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement lasting from the late-18th century to the end of the 19th century. Romantic art and ideas are characterized by intense emotion; subjective experience; spirituality; imagination; and a deep reverence for the natural world. In many ways, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment ideals of pure logic, the scientific method, and physical materialism. The Romantic movement began in a period characterized by rapid social change and political turmoil, as epitomized by the French Revolution. Many Romantics held liberal views, favored societal reform, and were suspicious of existing power structures, such as social class or religious institutions. Keats’s poetic idol William Wordsworth is considered a key figure in the British Romantic movement. Contemporaries Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley are also commonly categorized as British Romantics. Like his fellow Romantics, Keats’s poetry often explores the natural world, the lone individual, dreams and visions, and grand, complex emotions.

Modernism is a later philosophical, literary, and artistic movement lasting from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. Like Romanticism, the Modernist movement was shaped by social change, industrialization, and scientific progress. Modernism has a less unified aesthetic than Romanticism, being broadly characterized by a desire to break with tradition and to attain self-knowledge in an increasingly unfamiliar world. Although Keats is not a Modernist himself, his work didn’t gain widespread popularity until the very beginning of the Modernist movement. William Holman Hunt, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, based his painting The Eve of St. Agnes (1867) on “The Eve of St. Agnes” by Keats.

"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be" bears several hallmarks of Romanticism while anticipating the philosophical concerns of Modern art. The speaker in this poem focuses on the most intense moments of their feeling. It goes beyond fear into debilitating existential dread. This focus on high emotion is a signature Romantic move. Another Romantic aspect is the focus on the natural world. The speaker’s thoughts are united by the organic images of “full-ripen’d grain” (Line 4), silos, the night sky, clouds, and water. The speaker’s imaginative self-reflection is another Romantic trait. The core conflict of the poem is a purely imagined one. None of the terrible things in the poem are actually happening or have happened, but the speaker has imagined them so intensely that they feel real fear. This level of introspection edges on the self-consciousness characteristic of Modernism. The speaker’s solution to this internal struggle is an internal remedy. They must battle this terror alone, in their own mind, on the edge of the world. The unsatisfying resolution of the isolated speaker is a distinctly Modern move. At the edge, “on the shore” (Line 12) of resolution, there isn’t anything or anyone to make everything better—no divine being, no unifying ideology, no next life. The speaker is truly alone.