The thing about Keats was his death wish. It’s complicated.
The poet was different from everyone else. He had a gift. His purpose, compulsion even, was to embody this gift. He could see in ways that others could not, and then take the blind by their hands and lead them nearer to knowing the sublime. The sublime of course would be a poet’s natural habitat, but an isolated one. There was no one who might sense the world in the way they would. If love was experiencing beauty in sync with another, when you’re born a poet, it’s understood to be something you’ll never know. You will always be the scribe or the witness or the translator.
At least, this is how the Romantics thought of it.
But the curse of being human is need, right? Some people are at peace with what they must take, but others aren’t. Keats was not. This makes sense when you think about the poet as a medium, something divine. Divinity exists above the frankness of biology. Was ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ Fanny Brawn or was she the burden of language?
I don’t know, but who does.
The point is, is something to be willfully not understood. Does everybody have thoughts that form first in language? Just some of us? If a poet’s purpose is to articulate mimesis through lyric, does he exist when he’s got nothing to say?
