The influences on John Keats : Hellenism, Milton and Shakespeare

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the different influences which shaped and formed John Keats’s poetry and theories on the poetic character. This study discusses three major influences on Keats’s poetry; Hellenism, John Milton and William Shakespeare, influences which were prominent throughout important stages in Keats’s poetic career. The paper makes use of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence as a theoretical framework throughout each of the different influences on Keats, particularly Bloom’s ideas of the dominance of strong literary figures and the urge of newcomers to attempt to emulate the great poets of the past. The chapter on Hellenism features Martin Aske’s Keats and Hellenism as a main text, in order to locate and to trace Hellenistic elements in Keats’s poetry from his earliest poems to his great Odes written in 1819. The chapter on John Milton’s influence is traced particularly through Lynda Pratt’s paper Epic, Vincent Newey’s paper Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions and Greg Kucich’s Keats and English Poetry which look at the influence of Milton on Keats and at Keats’s attempts to write epic poetry inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Chapter on William Shakespeare’s influence on John Keats makes use of John Middleton Murry’s Keats and Shakespeare and Walter Jackson Bate’s John Keats. This chapter looks primarily at Shakespeare’s influence on Keats’s theories of Negative Capability and the Chameleon Poet, theories which are heavily used in Keats’s greatest poetry. The dissertation also makes use of a biographical approach, tracing Keats’s encounters with these three major influences throughout his life. This is done by means of Nicholas Roe’s detailed biography: John Keats: A New Life