Asher p.2 t.4 Romantic Era Synthesis

Romantic literature dealt with themes of a love of atmospheric landscapes; folk traditions; nostalgia for the past, especially the Gothic; mysticism; and a charm with death. John Keats is a Romantic poet who wrote poems that are related to inner conflicts. For example, in his poems, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, pain and pleasure are entwined; in his other poems, Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, death is intertwined with pleasure, and love is intertwined with pain. Some of the conflicts of men that appear in his works are passion or transient sensation; enduring art; dream or vision; reality; joy; melancholy; the ideal and real; and being immersed in passion and desiring to escape passion. In a piece of work, Keats wrote of a young woman he found charming, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..." His other works, such as Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, shows Keats trying to free himself from the changing world by identifying with the nightingale, which represents nature, or the urn, which represents art. In addition, The Ode to Psyche and the Ode to Melancholy, show the poet as a dreamer. Afar from the previous era, one can see that the Romanticism sought imagination and that its works showed secular representation of man.