Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats are outstanding representatives of the Romantic age of poetry who developed the ideas expressed by their predecessors. Both writers advocated for freedom of expression and claimed reason, facts, or objective laws should not shackle a true poet. For Shelley and Keats, poetry is a product of a free and inconstant flow of imagination inspired by sensuous and aesthetic experiences.
Shelley expressed his views on poetry in his essay “A Defence of Poetry”, where he compared “a mind in creation” to “a fading coal”, meaning that one cannot predict or control inspiration. Further in this essay, the writer comments on poetry’s role as an art of depicting everything beautifully and making everything “that is best and most beautiful” immortal (“A Defence of Poetry”). These ideas permeate Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, where unpredictable and fleeting inspiration is described as “unseen Power” with “inconstant wing” and “inconstant glance”, while beauty should be “consecrated” (1; 3; 6; 13).
Beauty, according to Shelley, is also a source of “grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream” (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, 13). So, the poem perfectly illustrates the author’s attitude towards inspiration and beauty as some mysterious powers by which people are guided.
Keats’s views on poetry are very similar to those of Shelley’s. In his letter “On Negative Capability”, Keats defined “negative capability” as a man’s capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” with no need of seeking facts or reasonable explanation. Keats wrote another remarkable letter, called “On the Imagination and “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts”, and as its name suggests, it comprises the author’s stance on the power of sensuous experience. In this letter, the poet stated that “what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth”. This idea is repeated in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth” (49). Thus, Keats also proclaimed the superiority of beauty over any other spiritual power in human life.
In conclusion, both Shelley and Keats were zealous supporters of poetic freedom of expression and claimed that beauty was the most powerful source of inspiration for them. This stance is reflected in Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry”, Keats’s letters, and their poetry. In their poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the writers glorify beauty and poetry’s power to keep it immortal.