In summary

Wise beyond his years and shaped by dramatic and dark forces, Keats lays out for us a method and system for fully embracing life: Negative capability and suffering force us to cling all the more tightly to this earth, as we seek out and embrace its all-encompassing beauty.

Like we see in the negatively capable Eve of St. Agnes, fleeting moments of joy such as the unity of Madeline and Porphyro are happening all around us - often in the midst of cold sadness and uncertainty. And as in the Ode on Melancholy, anguish itself is put forth as beautiful.

Revisiting the famous last phrase of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, I have now a better appreciation for its meaning. The journey through life takes us, necessarily, through pain and suffering on the road to discovering truth and beauty. Is beauty transcendent, or real, visceral and immediate? It's both; I believe Keats is fine with this interpretation, and I think I finally am too.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Ode to Autumn

If Keats’s works are examined within the context of expressing a philosophy and system for dealing with and understanding life – including Beauty and the painful – then in Ode to Autumn we see a maturation and culmination of this system where Keats transcends the transcendent.

Keats moves away from examining the conflicts and harmonies existing in the search for beauty and truth, to the purity of the image and the here and now. He lowers his guard and ceases to fight, and instead accepts what Is – bringing the idea of negative capability to fruition and maturation as a mode of understanding/interpretation.

To Autumn is a celebration of the present, as the exploration of negative capability ceases. It’s a total embrace of the human condition, including death. Death is present, but even so does not distract from the poem’s intention. Death is part of acceptance; the acceptance Keats has sought so ardently is fully expressed here. Keats reminds us very clearly that summer will cease; that life comes full-circle and part of that circle is death.

Until they think warm days will never cease;	10
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells

Only by living intensely in present moment, and fully committing to acceptance of life, good and bad, can one discover autumn has its own music:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

One year before his death, Keats muses he’s seen beautiful foreign flowers in hot houses, but it’s the simple local flowers he wants to see again. We're witnessing a culmination of his life philosophy – born, filtered, compressed and refined in such a short time: At the end, Keats is not seeking the transcendent idea of a Flower, or fusing of the mind and nature.

The simple flower is itself enough.

Ode on Melancholy

Keats takes on the very purpose of life in his “Vale of soul-making” letter to his brother, tackling timeless issues of suffering and salvation. For Keats, any system which ignores, circumvents or attempts to transcend suffering just won’t work. Thus Christianity with its emphasis on trials now, and an eternal payoff later, just doesn’t cut it.

“Circumstances are like clouds continually gathering and bursting – while we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into . . . the wide arable land of events.”

Keats assumes a world of suffering and argues for its necessity – as does Christianity:

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

However Keats seeks a reward for our suffering here, on earth, in the only reality we understand and know with certainty.

Keats was influenced by William Hazlitt, who said in his On Poetry in General lecture, “The keenness of immediate suffering makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life . . . and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.” For Keats, one must be open to experience to the point that all experience – including suffering not transcended but faced – has value. This direct confrontation of suffering is how we shape our souls, and in the process affirm life even while realizing that, inherent to life, is of course death.

Emergent Philosophy

So we see a philosophy emerging from John Keats, who is both a romantic idealist, and a skeptical realist. He denounced philosophical systems of living; yet his very denunciation of systematic interpretation was, in fact, a system of sorts. Negative capability and the inherent acceptance therein offer Keats and his readers a mode of understanding, and even a way of living.

THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness

Keats is a man comfortable working within paradoxes: The Ode on a Grecian Urn offers no concrete conclusion; the bride in this famous line above remains forever unravished and we’ve consummated nothing at the poem’s end. This is Keats as "pragmatic dreamer" – and critics argue it’s because of these uncertainties, doubts, ambiguities, and contradictions that Keats and Shakespeare are so attractive, and timeless. (Cambridge 252)

Keats may have inadvertently turned his lack of doctrine into a doctrine. Keats sees the poet and the dreamer as distinct: illusions of isolated perfection are for dreamers, not poets.

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

A Dreamer would prefer to seek out, and perhaps forever remain, in a romantic pastoral scene; but it is the job and duty of the poet to contrast this transcendent escape from reality with the even more vivid, real human reality – a reality where real truth lies for the pragmatic romantic Keats.

Pain: pathway to beauty & growth

Keats seemed to fully understand the pathway to spiritual growth and appreciation of beauty includes a detour through highly uncomfortable experience. Keats had a tough go of things, to say the least: Just as he was gaining fame, potential fortune, and love, he realized he had a fatal illness and he died.

Keats knew his health was poor and getting worse; about this time of morbid self-realization he launched into an incredible period of productivity - producing a landslide of brilliant works in under a year's time. Part of Keats's incredible works includes a series of odes, including Ode on Melancholy.

In this poem Keats puts forth:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Melancholy - a mixture of sadness and depression - is found inside the temple of delight. How seemingly ironic; yet Keats recognized the two ideas are intrinsically connected. One cannot experience delight, without also experiencing a deep sadness.