The Keatsian Turn

"Like Keats, the more [Wordsworth] feels his mortality, the more vital and fresh and precious the things of this world seem. 'How astonishingly,' says Keats a year before his death, 'does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy...I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our sp[r]ing are what I want to see again' (Letters, 2:260). Those simple flowers may resemble Wordsworth's 'meanest flower that blows' ["Immortality" ode, line 204] but there is this important difference: for Keats it is the flowers in and of themselves that matter, rather than their participation in the grand union of mind and nature. The actual flowers are beautiful. That is enough."

--Ronald A. Sharp, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty, Athens: University of Georgia Press (1979), 58.