Chapter-7 CONCLUSION 246 P a g e
Conclusion: From this comparative study between the different works of John Keats and Charles Baudelaire we can safely draw a conclusion on how differently the two poets handled the theme of beauty. Keeping in mind the temporal, spatial, biographical and political backgrounds about the two poets we have looked into their distinct and different approaches on the theme of beauty and idea of poetry. In the chapter titled Keats and Baudelaire: Biographical and literary, we have looked into the life of both the poets. Through this brief biographical sketch we found that there are considerable amount of similarities in them. Both Keats and Baudelaire lost their father at tender ages, their mothers remarried, which created problems for both of them. After his mother got remarried Keats went to live with his grandparents. Baudelaire was forcefully separated from his mother and sent to a boarding school. These separations not only made them feel lonely and created problems in their family life but also brought problems in the financial front to some extent. Keats mother died when he was still in school but Baudelaire led a miserable life of separation and missed her throughout. Both were not friendly to their step fathers and in fact Baudelaire hated his step father for taking his mother away from him. Secondly both Keats and Baudelaire had sour experience of failed love affairs. Throughout his life Keats pined for Fanny Brawne s love. Even though at one point of time they were close to coming together, various circumstances, chief of which was his ill health, stopped them from getting married. His unsuccessful relation with Fanny Brawne always pained him, but at the same time inspired him for his different works. In his Bright Star Keats speaks about the two things he 247 P a g e
considered to be very important in his life, of which one was his love for her. Baudelaire too experienced unsuccessful relationships. He had affairs with different women like Jeanne Duval a woman of mixed race whom he had met on his journey to India, Apollonie Sabatier a courtesan, and Marie Daubrun an actress. Apart from them he also had a prostitute named Sara as his mistress when he was studying law at École de Droit. His affairs with them did not last long but these women inspired many of his works. Both men were unhappy when it came to love life. Third point of similarity we find is that both suffered ill health. Keats suffered with consumption which ultimately brought about his death. It was in the family and his mother and a brother had died of it. He might have had contracted it while taking care of his brother Tom. Baudelaire had contracted syphilis and was suffering on that account. When he had enrolled himself at the École de Droit in 1840 he led an irregular life, socializing with various people and might have contracted syphilis while frequenting prostitutes. Another similarity about them was that both Keats and Baudelaire were addicted to opium. Keats might have had initially started taking it for medicinal purpose, as the use of laudanum, a mixture of poppy and alcohol was legal and was used as a pain-killer and tranquilizer. Keats might have had started to take it as pain killer but later he got addicted to it. Buadelaire s case was different. His wayward lifestyle had made him pick up the habit of taking opium to which he later got addicted. Next both men had given up their professions to take up poetry as vocation. Keats had worked as an apprentice for Thomas Hammond and after some years of apprenticeship, later in 1815 he had become a medical student at Guy s Hospital. He even passed an examination in July 1816 and obtained a license to practice but at the end of 1816 he announced his wish to abandon medicine and take up poetry seriously. Baudelaire had enrolled as a law student in 1840 at the École de Droit. But before completing his studies he had decided to take up a literary career, and for the next two years led an irregular life, socializing with other 248 P a g e
artists and writers. For their decisions both had to pay dearly. They earned the wrath of their guardians when they chose poetry over medicine and law. Their finances were cut Keats was not even allowed to meet his sister Fanny who was then in school. We see similarities even after they started their literary career. Both men were adversely received by the age. Keats first book of verse titled Poems appeared in 1817. The volume contained works like I stood tip-toe, Sleep and Poetry, some sonnets and verse epistles to Matthew, George and Cowden Clarke. No one took notice of the young poet. Loud cheers and much anticipation made by Keats friends and well wishers dampened. Endymion came out towards the end of 1817. The work was to transport him to the temple of fame but contrary to what Keats had expected happened. Immediately after its launch, J.G.Lockhart reviewed it adversely in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Keats was sneered as belonging to the Cockney school along with Leigh Hunt. Attacks were made month after month. Charles Baudelaire s Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) appeared on June 1857. Immediately in July the Ministry of the Interior Matters banned the volume accusing the author of outrage to public decency. Everyone involved with the work the author, the publisher, and the printer were persecuted and declared guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. Immediately six poems Lesbos, Femmes damnées Delphine et Hippolyte, Le léthe, À celle qui est trop gaie, Les Bijoux, and Les Métamorphoses du vampire were deleted from the work. One man was criticized on account of his association with Liegh Hunt and the other for his frank indecency. Both Keats and Baudelaire did not believe in the traditional ideas of the church and the society. They begged to differ from the conventional ideas of church, religion and matters of literature. So a brief biographical sketch just show us how closely similar their life were. However in spite of these similarities their way of looking at things, especially their ideas about beauty was completely different from one another. 249 P a g e
In the third chapter titled Keats and Baudelaire: Their Formative Influences we have looked into how both Keats and Baudelaire were influenced by different factors like their character, their age, different events of the age and at times the various writers and literary works. These various factors played important role to shape them as poets distinct from others. The influence was thematic, stylistic and at times on the way of approach. Though John Keats wrote in the second half of the English Romantic period Keats writings were not only tempered by the traits of the age but shaped by the trends of the preceding ages. The mythical Classical Gods, Goddesses and characters like the Titans, Olympians, satyrs, fauns and dryads relive in his works like Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn etc. The knights, horses, damsels, mysteries and magic of the medieval age find ample space in his works like Eve of St Agnes and La Bell Dame Sans Merci. Poets from the past like Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Dante, to name few influenced Keats poetry in different ways. The rich sensuousness of Spenser s Faeirey Queene is reflected plentifully in Keats poems. Milton s Paradise Lost inspired him to take up his Hyperion project which he had thought of making an epic on the lines of Milton s Paradise Lost. Poets of the Transitional age like Thomson, Chatterton, Gray and Collins influenced the works of Keats in different ways. Chatterton s personification of nature is again found plentifully in Keats works like Ode to Autumn and Ode to Nightingale. Chatterton was very fond of medieval style and diction and these are again reflected in Keats works. Thomson s The Seasons gave the age a new perspective of nature and Keats faithfully represented them in his works. From the works of Gray, Cowper, Burns, Collins and Crabbe, Keats learnt to give importance to and look sympathetically at the rural life and people belonging to the lower strata of the society. Keats was also influenced by the people around him. Leigh Hunt and the Cockney school too influenced 250 P a g e
him. Hunt s The Story of Rimini gave him diction and a heroic couplet. Apart from these the philosophies of the time and the trends of romantic literature also played a considerable role to shape up Keats works. Similarly when Baudelaire wrote, the new literature of Romanticism with new forms, meters, rhythms and themes had just started to blossom. Baudelaire was immensely influenced by these thoughts and ideas and they are reflected in his works. Rousseau encouraged intuition and free spirit and following him Baudelaire revolted against the standard norms of the time. Mallarme s syntactic innovations like inversion of nouns and verbs, separation of adjective from the noun it qualifies, avoidance of relative pronouns, conjunctions and omission of articles were also taken up by Baudelaire to make his verse condensed and concentrated. From Buffon s works Baudelaire borrowed poetic diction, phrases, images, sparing choice of subjects and more of the physicality of the subject. He also took up the architectonics which made Buffon s poems musical. Baudelaire was also influenced by Madame de Staël s stress on intuition and treatment of common ideas in a broader manner which gave more scope to the search for mystery and emotion. François René de Chateaubriand s strong support for liberalism and portrayal of the pains and maladies of modern life was again taken up by Baudelaire. A close analogy can be drawn between Chateaubriand and Baudelaire s works when they take up autobiographical colour, and in their glorification of the pathos of men. Baudelaire also looked upon Vigny who also in his works wrote about man s plight. Similarly he was also influenced by others like Hugo, Musset, Balzac and Dante. Dante s idea of hell, purgatory and paradiso is reflected in his concept of evolution of beauty. He was profoundly influenced by Edgar Allen Poe who advocated the idea of art for art s sake. Apart from these men Baudelaire s own life, his childhood, his journey to India, love affairs and relationships played important role in shaping up his poetic ideas and ideals. Whatever the sources of influences might be, we cannot in any case 251 P a g e
disregard the fact that the ideals of new romantic poetry, spirit of revolution, spirit of freedom from the rules and bondages of earlier literature, new perspective towards nature and common things of life, new ideas in diction and architectonics were similar in both Keats and Baudelaire. In the fourth chapter titled Two Planes of Aesthetics in Keats s Major Odes, Hyperion and Les Fleurs du Mal we have seen how Keats and Baudelaire differentiated as aesthetes. The images and ideas that these two poets used to glorify beauty are completely different from one another. There might be over lapping here and there, but they may be considered just stray events. Keats chooses an ideal world for his poems and to describe the beauty of this world he chooses the best of ideas, words and images. Very often he uses imageries associated with the ancient Greek art, Gods and Goddesses as in Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Lamia, Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Endymion. In his Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion through the story of the fall of Titans in the hands of Olympians gives us an idea about the eternal rule of nature that first in beauty is also the first in strength. In the process of establishing his belief in the power of beauty, he uses beautiful descriptions and superb imagery. His Ode to Psyche is a tribute to a Greek Goddess and at the same time she is also beauty personified. Keats feels that she has been declared as Goddess a little too late, thus has lesser number of followers. In order to compensate that, Keats declares that he would be a worshipper of this Goddess of beauty and in the process also built a temple for her in the deepest recesses of his mind. Similarly the urn in Ode on a Grecian Urn becomes an unravished bride in Keats hand. The urn is engraved with beautiful images that Keats celebrates in his ode. He feels that with a little bit of imagination and a help of art ordinary things might be really beautiful and at the same time permanent. Keats always celebrates perfect beauty, which is often 252 P a g e
present in the lands beyond the real world. In Ode to Nightingale poet desires to escape to the ideal world of the nightingale. The nightingale in the Ode to a Nightingale represents an ideal place for the poet to take refuge. The poet celebrates the beautiful and enticing song of the bird. It is so beautiful that it has the capacity to transport anyone to its world, which the poet imagines to be without any kind of pain and hardships. He believes that the nightingale s song he celebrates has lived this world for eternity. The song s beauty makes it valuable for eternity. It brings about aches and pains of joy. In his Ode to Melancholy according to Keats even melancholy lives in a temple, and it is a kind of divinity. In his odes to Fancy and Autumn Keats tell us about the impermanent character of beauty. So the beauty of summer and autumn are restricted to specific seasons. In Ode to Autumn he says that each season has its own beauty and charm along with its own songs. Many believe that autumn is a season of death and decay. For Keats however autumn is a season of fruitfulness and thus portrays it with rich sensuous appeal. In the ode he uses images, which the readers can actually feel, touch, see and smell. The harsh real world is not beautiful and thus it cannot entice the poet. Keats believes in the power of beauty. In Hyperion he says...first in beauty is first in might.( Hyperion, L 229) From the study of his odes we can see that all throughout Keats is conscious about and continuously singing about the beautiful things of life. The beauty he speaks about is without any kind of blemishes. On the other hand Baudelaire s beauty is much more complex, and in a way in direct contradiction to Keats idea. When Keats finds beauty in Gods and Goddesses, Baudelaire finds it in the naked body of prostitutes, beggars, tramps who are covered with tattered pieces of clothes and decaying dead body full of stench. Baudelaire does not seek to escape to the ideal world 253 P a g e
like Keats, but on the other hand tries to find solace and beauty in the midst of the ugliness around him. He finds his subject in his city of Paris. He believed that, in order to experience the beautiful it is necessary for one to pass through the ugly things of life. His images of beauty are not like that of Keats, without any kind of blemishes, but on the contrary are of ordinary day to day life with ugliness and shortcomings. Baudelaire uses unconventional images like witch, snake, ship, prostitute, naked body of a woman, beggar, so on and so forth as his symbols of beauty. By using those images he was again trying to point out that his works are products of evil yet they like flowers they adorn the very concept of evil. When we look into Baudelaire s concept of beauty we are reminded of Dante s paradise. For Dante to experience paradise it was necessary for one to go through hell and purgatory. Until and unless one does not go through the experience of hell and purgatory one cannot reach paradise. Similarly for Baudelaire to experience beauty one has to first experience the ugliness of life. This is the main difference between Keats s and Baudelaire s idea about beauty. This is where they differentiate as aesthetes. One important reason for this might be the fact that Baudelaire lived much longer than Keats. Keats died at a tender age of twenty-six. Baudelaire on the other hand lived much longer and had greater experiences about life. He understood the pains of life better. His experiences in life helped him to find beauty even in the harsh realities of life. In the fifth chapter titled Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Epave and Hyperion- The Progressive Sense of the Beautiful we have seen at the kind of progressions of beauty in Keats a dn Baudelaire s works. As theoretical stance I have taken Sri Aurobindo s philosophy of evolutionary process. The main idea upon which Sri Aurobindo s philosophy rests is the essential importance of both matter and spirit, or body and soul which are looked upon as real. Both are given equal importance and none is ignored as it is so often done in 254 P a g e
other one-sided spiritualistic or materialistic philosophies. Sri Aurobindo affirms the presence of spirit in all forms of matter and this spirit is important to give meaning to the idea of immortal sense in immortal existence. Through this he claims the presence of all pervading spirit in all forms of matter. And similarly matter is equally important to understand this spiritual experience. History of human thoughts points out that different philosophers have always been ignoring one or the other. Many times spirit has been denied as an illusion of imagination and at other times matter has been denied as the illusion of the senses. It is important to understand that the first and basic being for the evolutionary process to take place is matter. Both mind and Life are evolved in matter. Like Sri Aurobindo both Keats and Baudelaire have in their poems given importance to both matter and spirit. They believed in the presence of spirit in all matter. Accordingly evolution for them was not a mere isolation of spirit from the matter but a transformation of the latter to the former. So the first and basic important being for the process of evolution is matter. In their poems the transformation in the process of evolution begins and takes place in the individual materialistic level and not at cosmic level. Both men always takes into consideration both matter and spirit. The evolutions that we see in their works are from the common to the elevated, lesser to the greater and material to the spiritual. The evolution takes place in all the three wayswidening, heightening and integration. By widening we mean providing a greater room for the operation, heightening means ascent from the lower to the higher level and integration means taking up all previous lower grades and transforming them. It is not just an ascent to the higher grade but also implies transformation of all the lower grades. However knowledge through experience is considered important to understand this idea of evolution fully. As pointed out, both Keats and Baudelaire believed in the importance of matter and spirit. They believed that evolutionary process begins at the physical or the material level and this evolution is not a total isolation of the 255 P a g e
spiritual from the material but a complete three way transformation of the latter. Yet we find two distinct kinds of progression taking place in these two poets. This point of difference is seen at the material level or at the origin point. Keats Hyperion speaks about his idea of the evolution of the beautiful. The Olympians have superseded the Titans the old order of Gods. Saturn and Thea in the beginning of the poem look disastrous at their fall. The other Gods too look pathetic and they cannot come into terms at their fallen state. It is through Oceanus speech in Book II Keats speaks out his mind about progression. He speaks about evolution as a natural process. The evolution that has taken place here is from a certain level of the beautiful as symbolized by Titans in comparison to Chaos of the initial stage, to more beautiful Gods and Goddesses as symbolized by the Olympians. Oceanus also believes that with a passage of time Olympians will meet their fall in the hands of more beautiful Gods when their time comes. To understand this progression of beauty or evolution, knowledge becomes an important factor. Oceanus has acquired this knowledge so is able to accept the fall. Similarly in the Fall of Hyperion Moneta has knowledge enormous. With knowledge the mind has progressed from one level to another. On the other hand the progression of beauty in Baudelaire is much more complex one than Keats. Baudelaire s evolutionary progression reminds us of Dante s concept of hell, purgatory and paradise. Baudelaire chooses in each of his poems a quest to progress to the ideal beauty. He seeks to move from the ugly to the beautiful and physical to the spiritual. The images that he takes from this materialistic world are at once ugly and detestable. He gives us ugly pictures of naked women, beggars with tattered clothes, decomposed dead bodies with flies buzzing about it, albatross not at its splendor but in a degraded state, so on so forth. However he does not stop there. At times they are even images of erotic and sadistic fantasies. From these ugly and 256 P a g e
vulgar descriptions he moves on to an ideal beauty lying beneath them. He chooses not to linger about at the physical level but moves on to the spiritual and the psychic realm. This idea can be seen plentifully in his works like Les Bijoux, Le serpent Qui Danse, Tout Entiere, Le Poison and many other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. In his Correspondences the progression is from the finite to the infinite, terrestrial to the divine. They move beyond the physical. This difference might be because of the fact that Baudelaire well understood the fallen state of man. He had gained more experience about life and acquired more knowledge to understand the concept of evolution better. The discourse in the chapter clearly points out two distinct kinds of progression of the sense of beautiful that takes place in the Keats and Baudelaire s poems. In chapter six titled The Language and Rhetoric Projecting the Aesthetics we have seen that both Keats and Baudelaire developed distinctive characteristic style in their writings. They differed in many ways not only from the other writers of the time but also from each other. They developed various rhetorical devices to express their thoughts perfectly. They chose their theme and language especially their diction according to their convenience. These various stylistic devices not only made them stand apart from the rest, but also at the same time help in projecting them as aesthetes in two different ways. Their characteristic style helped them to portray the beautiful in different ways to the world. Keats art was a unique case at least in the nineteenth century. He was a natural aesthete and a natural philosopher. He is often referred to as a pure poet. I believe critics mean by that Keats spontaneity or naturalness. He picked up some basics of the Greek myth, a little of Milton, and the idea of evolution in general, which he used in Hyperion. He learnt from Shakespeare- as he indicates in his letters- the art of negative capability 257 P a g e
and concealed the intensity of his personal suffering in his poetry. He just yearned for one thing, vaguely sometimes, Beauty. His concept of Beauty is not static; it originates from the senses and moves upward towards finer planes of imaginative, intellectual, and ideal Beauty. The exploration of Hell is not intense in Keats and merely hinted at in Endymion, Lamia, the Odes and Hyperion. For Baudelaire, art is certainly for Beauty s sake. But he wishes to see Beauty by exploring the dark zones of human consciousness. He wishes to transform the ugly into the beautiful with a somber seriousness. More acutely than Keats, Dante is a living reality for Baudelaire. He lacks the refined aestheticism of Keats, although beauty is also his ultimate choice. He knows more deeply than Keats that non can reach the province of beauty, which has not passed through hell. His definition of the beautiful indicates the relationship between the hell and the beautiful. Mystery and regret are also characteristics of the Beautiful. His poetry is the best guide to his concept of Beauty which lies mixed up with his hellish experience. Beauty in Baudelaire is like a total experience, and integral sight. There are times when a Keatsian longing possesses the spirit of Baudelaire as in Le Voyage, when the glory of the sunlight on the violent sea, the glory of cities in the setting sun kindled an unquiet longing in our hearts, to plunge into the sky s reflections. This instantly reminds us of young Keats, whom we see a restless being in Endymion in a search for the great key/ To Golden places. And yet Keats lacks the intensity of Baudelaire s intuitive awareness of the mystery of the world. So from the study we have been successful at looking into how John Keats and Charles Baudelaire dealt with the subject of beauty in their poems. Both are aesthetes, but they differentiate from one another when it comes to their way of dealing with the theme of beauty. ****************************************** 258 P a g e