원문정보
Difference between “the Poet” and “the Dreamer” : In Case of The Eve of St. Agnes
초록
영어
Even while he was in good health, Keats was conscious of his early death and dedicated his life to his art with a desperate urgency, achieving the culmination of his brief poetic career amid the vortex of his acute distress and emotional turmoil. As it is written in The Book of Job, suffering and death are inevitable in our lives as they were in all of Keats’s major poems. Even in The Eve of St Agnes, which might be easily mistaken as a simple fairy-tale or romance, Keats is in fact wrestling with the problem of evil and suffering, and dramatizes the conflict between the dream and the reality of passionate love. To try to blink or even transcend human suffering is merely a task of a dreamer or a poetaster. But the true poet would not assume to escape from the harsh reality either through the comfort of the traditional belief or through the illusion of the visionary imagination. He would struggle to find consolation—however momentary and vulnerable—in the very context of the sorrowful world, and finally make the sublunary world beautiful by his own particular perception of human suffering. It is very sad that our life and its beauty are transitory. But it is the very fact of transience that makes them more meaningful. As Keats says, “the poet and the dreamer are distinct, diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes; and the height of poetry can be reached only by those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest.”
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Abstract