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.
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