John Keats: As a Sensuous Poet

The term ‘sensuous’ usually refers to delights borrowed from the senses. Sensuousness is the quality derived from five senses- sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It is a way of perception through five senses. A sensuous poet uses those word pictures that help the reader to understand the sights and sounds expressed or suggested in a poem. John Keats is best known for his use of such images that appeal to human senses. The poetry of Keats is characterized by the use of sensuous language. Keats is a worshipper of beauty and apprehends beauty everywhere. It is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. All his works, including his great odes contain rich sensuous appeal.

“Ode to Nightingale” is one of the most remarkable poems of sensuousness. In the second stanza of this ode, there is a description of the gustatory sensation of drinking wine. There are references to the visual and auditory senses too. The poet also paints the picture of a drunken whose mouth is purple stained because of the red wine he has drunk:

“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth,”

‘Ode to Autumn’ is considered to be the perfect embodiment of concrete sensuous experience. The poem gives a graphic description of the season with all its variety and richness. The whole atmosphere and the mood of the season are presented through sensuous imagery and descriptions:        

                 “With fruits the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

                                 To bend with apples and moss’d cottage-trees,

                                 And fill all fruits with ripeness to the core.”

                ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn’ contains a series of sensuous picture-passionate men and Gods chasing  reluctant maidens, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the tree enjoying an everlasting spring, etc. The ecstasy of the passion of love and of youth is beautifully depicted in the following lines:

                       More happy love! More happy happy love!

                       Fore ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

                       For ever painting, and forever young.

            In the ‘Ode to fancy”, we have a series of pictures which please our senses. The fruits of autumn, buds and bells of May, the sweet singing of the birds, the various flowers, the daisy, the marigold, the lily, the primrose are a kind of feast which we enjoy as we go through the poem.

Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters “O for a life of sensation than of thoughts”. He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.

Keats is a poet of sensations. His thoughts are enclosed in sensuousness and this sensuousness is linked to the great pictorial quality of his poetic art in which he equals the excellence of Spencer. Keats is a mystic of senses. He sought to reveal the ultimate truth of the universe trough aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts. As he became a mature poet, Keats began to see not only the beauty of things but also their truth. The sensuousness of Keats’s poetic language is a heroic attempt to stabilize and appreciate an ultimately unattainable reality. That is why Keats’s poetic genius is unparalleled for all ages.