The Concept of the Sublime in John Keats’s Poetry: A Romantic Perspective

The concept of the sublime in John Keats’s poetry represents a distinctive evolution within Romanticism, diverging from the egotistical sublime of predecessors like William Wordsworth toward a more sensuous, ego-displaced engagement with beauty, mortality, and transcendence. This paper explores how Keats reformulates the sublime through his Great Odes and other works, drawing on influences from Edmund Burke’s terror-based aesthetics, Immanuel Kant’s moral elevation, and Friedrich Schiller’s notion of mixed feelings of woe and joy. Central to Keats’s approach is the “poetical character” that embraces negative capability—remaining in uncertainties without irritable reaching for resolution—allowing the sublime to emerge from the interplay of sensory delight and melancholic awareness of transience. Key poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “Ode on Melancholy” illustrate this, where the sublime arises not from overwhelming nature but from intimate, imaginative immersion in art, myth, and the human condition. The analysis introduces the “Sensevil Sublime,” a Keatsean innovation that repositions sublimity in the corporeal and putrefied senses, subverting traditional hierarchies through de-personification of the ego and moral superiority via bodily resurrection. By comparing Keats with Romantic theories and contemporaries, this study argues that his sublime offers a pathway to eternal truths amid mortality, emphasizing humility, gusto, and creative displacement over self-projection. Ultimately, Keats’s poetry transforms the sublime into a pathetic, accessible force that bridges the sensible and supersensible, enriching Romantic perspectives on human freedom and imagination. This comprehensive examination draws on scholarly interpretations to highlight Keats’s contributions to aesthetic philosophy, concluding with implications for understanding Romanticism’s enduring legacy.