SOURCE: "Beauty: the Keatsian Aesthetic Ideal," in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Vol. 17, 1984, pp. 251-69.

In the following examination of the function of beauty in Keats's poetry, Eruvbetine maintains that beauty is idealized by Keats because it serves as the medium for apprehending truth. While Keats resolves beauty and truth into one aesthetic ideal, Eruvbetine explains, beauty is the primary concept and the focus of the ideal.

When Keats wrote "Sleep and Poetry" in the summer of 1816, he expressed the wish for "ten years that [he] may overwhelm/[Himself] in poesy; so [he] may do the deed/That [his] soul has to itself decreed" (96-8). However, as early as January 1818, when he wrote the sonnet titled "when I have fears," he was almost certain of the imminence of a death that would inevitably prevent him from overwhelming himself in poesy or beauty, and from gleaning and storing the riches or...