Defying Eternity in Keats’s Poetry

Keats’s poetry often seems deeply concerned by the threat of eternity rather than its promise. Even while dying, Keats remained in love with mutability and the earthly. Eternity offered no consolation for losing his human life. This chapter views Keats’s poetry as taking the attitude that eternity is not a human property. Keats makes what is human, mortal, and sensual into the essence of poetry in which eternity cannot but seem a deadly abstraction. Eternity, unmentioned, undesired, and unidealised, stands as the polar opposite of what Keats, that great, and above all, human poet, seeks to achieve. Eternity shadows Keats’s earthly poetic achievements, where the poet’s struggle to remain embodied becomes Keats’s defiance of eternity.