John Keat's Imagery or Pictorial Quality
He is the father of the Pre-Raphaelite poets like Rossetti and Morris and also influenced Tennyson. Keats is one of the greatest word painters above all its other qualities. The picture follows the picture in quick succession in his poems and each picture is remarkable for its vividness and minuteness of detail. His images are concrete and stand in striking contrast with Shelley's images which are abstract and vague.
The Eve of St.Agnes is literary full of pictures.
Keats was in fact a great artist interested not in propaganda or social reform but in making poetry an instrument of presenting beauty and loveliness in its finest forms.
In 'Ode to Autumn', Autumn has been represented in the concrete forms of a reaper, winnower, gleaner, etc.
The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' contains a series of vivid and concrete pictures - passionate men and God chasing reluctant maidens, the flute-players playing their ecstatic music, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved, the happy branches of the trees, the townspeople going to a place of worship in order to offer a sacrifice with a mysterious priest to lead them, the little town which will always remain desolate.
While giving us the picture of inanimate objects, Keats often invests them with life and with the power to feel, see and think so as to make his pictures more vivid. He tells of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, and feelings. Keats in his humility once spoke that his name is writ in water and will be soon wiped out. But the passage of time has endeared the poet to the world of poetry. His name is really written in the water of life and so long as the current of life will flow he will be remembered as a great poet and a great artist. Poetry for Keats had no mission save to minister the sensuous as well as philosophical instincts of men. "We have poetry, Keats wrote to Reynolds" that has a palpable design upon us. Poetry should great and unobtrusive.
Another point of Keat's pictorial quality is that most of his pictures are sensuous in appeal. In other words his pictures to our sense of sight, sense of taste, sense of smell, sense of hearing, and sense of touch. Many of his pictures are colorful. In the richness of colour, no picture can surpass Keat's description in the Eve of St. Agnes of a high window decorated with "carven imageries" and "diamonded panes of quaint wings".
In "Ode to Autumn", Keats makes the abstract look by virtue of his pictorial art. In the second stanza of this poem, he gives us some remarkable pictures of autumn. Autumn is represented like a woman whose hair is uplifted by the winnowing wind, she is represented as a reaper who is overpowered by the strong smell of strong pappy and she is shown sitting by the cedar press watching the dripping juice.
The chief characteristics of Keats pictorial effect are
a. Minuteness of details
b. Sensuousness and
c. Concreteness
a) Keats excels in heaping details upon detail. He selects significant details and by bringing them together, he produces an unforgettable effect. He seldom creates a picture by a few bold strokes of the brush. he works slowly and minutely.
b) Sensuousness is the second characteristic of his word picture or pictorial art. Generally, his pictures appeal to the senses. They have no spiritual or allegorical meaning. His pictures have no appeal for the eye or the ear. They do not suggest anything beyond what they appear to be.
c) Solidity or concreteness is the third characteristic of Keats's pictorial effects. Keat's pictures settle in one's mind and leave an abiding impression on the memory of the reader. They are not thin, frail, or liquid, like the pictures of Shelly. In simple words, they are not abstract. They can be visualized easily by the reader. They are neither imperceptible nor subtle.
Keats was an artist interested in moving through the rough and tumble of life but in a world of romance and beauty, where the worries and anxieties of the world fail to make their mark. He was the poet of beauty and loveliness and he created beauty for poetry. He will be loved for his beautiful pictures of beauty in physical as well as spiritual aspects.
As an artist, he loved nature and his whole body and soul were tremulous with delight before the sight and scenes of his nature. Indeed, no poet in English Literature except Shakespeare has ever given us such remarkable pictorial effect as Keats. Keats followed Spenser by delighting in pen pictures and pen portraits. By his characterization, he produces a lasting impression on the reader's mind. In contradiction of Shelley's abstract pictures, Keat's pictures are solid and have nothing airy or unearthly about him. Much of the imagery in the poetry of Keat is detailed and elaborate and bears witness to his powers of minute observation.
The concreteness of Keat's images impresses them on our minds. Many of these images were drawn from his own observation of English woods and gardens.
We can conclude our statement of the pictorial quality in Keat's poetry by quoting Graham Hough's remark on the point. He says, "The poetic equivalent for an emotion with Keats is commonly a picture, what he has to say about feeling as such is often quite vague and generalized, even his rhythms are less actually responsive to changes of emotional tone than those of many other poets, it is by the precision of his sensuous imagery - bright and clear, yet rich, like the figures in a painted missal that he commends the response that he wants".
Some of the brilliant pictures include
The sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind
Or on a half reap'd furrow and asleep
Drous'd with the fume of pappies they hook
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