









































Communication, Society and Media 
ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 6, No. 1, 2023 
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9 
 

Original Paper 

Transcending Boundary of Poetry and Painting: The Pictoriality 

of John Keats’s Poetry 
Yaru WANG1 & Dan CUI2* 

1 Undergraduate student of School of English, Jilin International Studies University, Changchun, China 
2 Postdoc of Literature of School of English, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China; Doc of 

Literature, Professor, Dean of Institute of International Language and Culture, Leader of Comparative 

Literature and Cross-culture Discipline, Jilin International Studies University, Changchun, Jilin, China; 

Doc supervisor of Yanbian University, Yanji, Jilin, China 
* Dan CUI, Corresponding Author, E-mail: summerelephant@126.com 

 
Received: November 18, 2022    Accepted: November 30, 2022   Online Published: January 16, 2023 

doi:10.22158/csm.v6n1p9                         URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v6n1p9 

 
Abstract 

Keats lived a short life span, but in his space of 25 years’ life, Keats showed the world his remarkable 

talent for poetry. The pictorial nature of Keats’ poetry is obvious. This paper takes the boundary of 

poetry and painting as the starting point, mainly studying pictorial embodiment, causes, and influences 

in his poems. Keats’ unique sense of love, imagination, and depiction of nature is strongly reflected in 

the sense of color and three-dimensionality in his poems, thus achieving the effect of “reading poetry as 

appreciating painting” for readers. 

Keywords 

John Keats, romanticism, transcending the boundary of poetry and painting, painterliness 

 

1. Introduction 

Keats lived at a time when Romanticism was flourishing and art was well developed. Of all the types of 

art, painting was one of artistic forms that are most closely associated with Romanticism, and Romantic 

poetry was an art itself, with a distinctly painterly character. Poetry and painting have a long history of 

the association, and the two are independent of each other and closely linked as well. The development 

of pictorial poetry has gone through four successive periods: classical, neo-classical, romantic, and 

modern period. It began with Lessing, a leading representative of the German Enlightenment, whose 

aesthetic work La Raccoon profoundly explores the boundaries between poetry and painting and 

provides the direction for pictorial poetry. 

mailto:summerelephant@126.com


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2. The Evolution of Painting and Poetry 

It is well known that both poetry and painting are conventionally artistic modes and share certain 

characteristics. They are both “art of imitation”. This concept has been interpreted by many 

philosophical forefathers: Aristotle in his Poetics pinpointed the essential feature of art—imitation, in 

his perspective, poetry seems to have sprung from two causes, each of which lying deeply in our nature. 

Imitation is our instinct nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being 

manifestly sections of rhythm. Taine in his Philosophie De L’Art further interpreted simultaneously five 

major arts: poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music (Taine, 1928, p. 44).When seeking 

commonly shared opinions from the two, both critics consider art as are presentation of the real world. 

Because of poetry, in particular, they agree on that the pictorial nature of poetry as produced out of 

artistic imagination is what the poet charges his fantasy into an image and then represents this image in 

front of its viewers. 

In the contemporary post-modernism era, classification principles of modern art, which are based on 

aesthetic independence and artistic self-discipline, has gradually lost their theoretical legitimacy due to 

the constant contradiction with the currently art development reality, and are replaced by cross-cultural 

and cross-disciplinary exchanges and cooperation in art, which is so-called the “crossover” of art, to 

borrow the current fashionable term. At present, the increasingly widespread artistic reality, such as the 

integration and fusion of different art disciplines and styles, and even the cooperation between art and 

other industries such as fashion, finance, and real estate, and the lending of strength to each other, are 

sufficient to show that art transcending over is no longer simply a certain art event, but an art 

development trend that leads the current art fashion and trend, and represents a new type of art that is 

different from the modern aesthetic value orientation. It represents a new type of art concept that 

distinguishes itself from modern aesthetic values. The prevalence of art crossover is changing the 

history of art development, injecting much more fresh elements into the art itself, and thus art has 

become a more inclusive “general art”, illustrating the possibility of breakout and rebirth in the 

post-modern cultural field full of pessimistic arguments about the “termination of art”, and this is just 

like a new kind of art revolution (Chen, 2019, p. 25). 

In the past, art seems to possess a boundary that is always held fast, but now it is outdated. Whoever 

keeps this boundary anymore is conservative and whoever breaks it up is new trendy (Gao, 2021, p. 1). 

After the modern art system had been established, there was a process of continuous expansion. The 

establishment of this system originally depended on the combination of poetry, painting, and music 

together. Before that, only two were combined, that is, poetry and music or poetry and painting. 

It is conventionally admitted that “painting” is considered as the art of space, while “poetry” being the 

art of time. The former is feasible for expressing objects, perceived by the eyes, with the highest law 

being beauty; the latter is for portraying actions, perceived by the sense of hearing. In Laocoon, 



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Lessing proposed that poetry and painting are like two friendly neighbors who are inseparable from 

each other. Although there are always a tentative exchanges across the border, it is undoubtedly a 

betrayal of their independence if they give up their respective independence and throw themselves 

completely into each other’s arms (Lessing, 2022, pp. 102-187). 

Painting and poetry, as two very different forms of artistic expressions, show us certain specific 

beauties with their specific symbols: the former depends on color, line, shape, light, etc. while the latter 

comes with the help of language, including the format, rhyme and rhythm, structure and narrative 

strategies. It was mentioned earlier that poetry and painting are both imitation arts, and when one 

speaks of artists imitating poets or poets imitating artists, the phrase can be interpreted from two 

aspects: one is that this party actually uses the work of the other party as the object of imitation, and the 

second is that both parties imitate the same object, while this party adopting the manner and style of the 

other party. 

However, there also exists a difference between poetry and painting in view of conception and 

expression. The text is a temporal, dynamic expression, while the painting is a spatial, static expression. 

Words can deliver a temporal process while pictures can frame a momentary situation. A painting is the 

condensation of a poem while a poem is the extension of a painting. 

But when poetry and painting are intermingled, they can also reflect beauty. Voltaire once articulated a 

beautiful contrast between the two: a painting is a kind of silent poetry, while a poem is a sound 

painting, which is similar to the articulation of the Chinese poet of Wei Wang，who states that painting 

is a silent poem and poem, a voiced painting.  

Why then does Laocoon not wail in his engravings, but wail in poems? This can trace back to the 

physical pain with which the poet’s consciousness conveys the feeling of pain while the artist is not 

willing to follow the cliché path. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was the supreme law of the plastic arts, 

but the purpose of art was to entertain, and entertainment was optional. Keats pursues beauty in his 

poetry, and the principle that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” has been widely recognized, which refers to 

beauty as the ultimate goal of art that coincides with the Greek view. Keats can be said to have 

accomplished the transcendence over the boundary of poetry and painting, painting in poetry and 

poetry in painting, independent based on fusion and coexisting in the boundary of transcendence. 

However, some exceptional aspects are interpreted in Laocoon. According to Lessing’s elaboration, 

“painting” refers to general plastic arts, including sculpture, while “poetry” refers to literature in 

general. In Laocoon, Lessing believes that artists should avoid depicting moments at the zenith of 

passion in the process of creation. According to Lessing, the sculptor should concentrate on the point 

before the climax rather than the very moment when sculpting, to ensure that the viewer is left with 

enough room for further imagination (Lessing, 1766, p. 187). If Laocoon’s wail was frozen in stone 

from the very start, it would appear “mundane and tedious”. Both Lessing’s praise of poetry and 



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depreciation of painting, and the emphases on the past over the present, illustrate very strong 

enlightenment though possess certain limitations observed from the present perspective.  

Bards were first a special profession in ancient Celtic society, flourishing at the end of the 11th to 13th 

centuries, and their roots are in the musical expressions derived from the martial spirit and chivalry of 

the Crusaders, which led to the formation and development of music. The earliest form of literature is 

poetry, which circulated in oral form, and the major poets were the bards (bard, gleeman, minnesinger, 

and minstrel). It is only after the introduction of Christianity to England that some poems were 

recorded. The most representative literary work of this period is the English national epic Beowulf, 

written in head rhyme (alliteration). They were geniuses and talents in their own right, and they could 

come from noble and rich families or lowly and poor ones. Thanks to their wisdom, they created many 

novel stories and provided them with good food and lodges. However, they were rejected later due to 

the non-recognition of their values and even denied by the statement that their works could not amuse 

God.  

It was not until the 18th century in Europe that serious attempt began to be made to link these three in 

an aesthetic sense. Soon it came to five: in Bartow, painting was added to sculpture, and music brought 

in dance, creating the union of the five: poetry, painting, music, sculpture, and dance. The crossover 

and synthesis of the different disciplines with each other finally developed a huge family of art (Gao, 

2021, p. 2). However, from the Romantic Movement onwards to the subsequent waves of social 

revolutions, there was always a constant stream of interest from the folk and lower social strata brought 

into art, which repetitively smashed the boundaries of the original art. But the development of 

Romanticism also succeeded in transcending the boundaries of art, as exemplified by the transgression 

of poetry and painting in the poems of Keats, as Plato asserted that what the artists produced was mere 

“the shadow of a shadow”. 

In English romanticism, William Blake has always been claimed to be one of the forefathers of English 

Romantic poetry together with Robert Burns featured with Scottish style. His early works are simple 

and clear, while his later ones tend to be more metaphysical and mystical. Throughout his life, he lived 

a simple and quiet creative life with his wife and spent the whole of his lifespan on poetry and 

engravings. Therefore, his works are featured by the mutual echoing of each other.  

Blake was indeed a devoted genius “away from the world”, reminding people of another influential but 

“mad” genius of the 19th century—Van Gogh. Throughout the history of the western art world, 

countless famous artists have painted countless works with biblical themes, but it is William Blake that 

adopted them as a means to express his interpretation of the secular world in contrast to the ideal. By 

implementing a completely personal perspective, he focused more on observing life and depicting the 

details of life into allegorical works, which is similar to that of Van Gogh. Blake was once seen sitting 

naked with his wife in the shade of a tree in the courtyard reading Paradise Lost, and when he saw 



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someone came, he happily compared himself and his wife to Adam and Eve. The content of Blake’s 

artworks is completely different from that of other painters. He believed that all forms were perfected 

in poetic conception, which was not abstract and did not come from nature, but from imagination. His 

poems and paintings were created in his imagination, and he stated that a person who has never been to 

heaven in his mind and thoughts is not an artist. It is clear that Blake was an artist of imaginative 

genius, and the ideas of genius are often infinitely fluid. Is painting limited to a monotonous and 

tedious imitation of reality? This is a question. Blake used his paintings to prove to the world that 

painting, like poetry and music, exists and revels in immortal ideas. As in Auguries of Innocence, Blake 

composes that we can master the principle of the world in the grain of sand” and “wildflower” and thus 

eventually comprehends the mystery of the world. With the development of Romanticism, the 2nd 

generation including Shelley, Byron, and Keats also created poems, in which they search for pictoriality 

with the pursuit of beauty as evident under their pen. 

 

3. John Keats’s Pictorial Writing 

Color is the most sensitive formal element that evokes our common aesthetic pleasure. Color is 

generally divided into warmness and coldness, lightness and darkness, soft and hard, front and back, 

etc. Keats is good at making use of color in his poems to create a beautiful picture for the readers, and 

the sense of color is evident in the pictorial nature of Keats’ poetry, which will be analyzed from the 

following four perspectives. 

3.1 Writing of Warmness and Coldness 

The 1st aspect is concerned with the warmness and coldness. The color itself does not have the 

temperature difference between warmness and coldness, and it is the visual color that triggers people’s 

psychological association, which in turn produces a sense of warmness and coldness. Keats makes the 

best use of contrast between them in order to show the sense of color in his poetry. For example, in “To 

Autumn”, the misty season and the round ripe fruits illustrate the interweaving of white and red, and 

the red apples are reflected in contrast to the white foggy sky. The orange sun and the green vines also 

set a novel set of contrasts. Keats adopts the warm and cold relationship between colors to present 

readers with the beauty of a colorful early autumn morning, telling them that even autumn is a season 

of interwoven colors and bountiful harvests. 

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless; 

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core” (Keats, 1820, p. 248) 



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There are also contrasts of warm and cold colors in “Ode to the Nightingale”. The 1st half illustrates 

John Keats’ concerns for the green fields and the bright red spring, for the poet’s need of drinking 

painfully, and then it goes into fatigue, sickness and fever, irritability, gray hair, and dark blue sky. This 

strong sense of color expresses the transformation of the poet’s moodwith happiness to be lost and thus 

pondering over life: 

“Tasting of Flora and the country green, 

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth; 

O for a beaker full of the warm South, 

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene” (Keats, 1820, p. 232) 

Likewise, in “Ode to Psyche”, the poet composes blue and silver flowers, purple buds waiting to bloom, 

and sapphire Phoebe (Diana) , by which he set the contrast in light and it shows readers a vivid painting 

of Greek gods: “and in this wide quietness, /A rosy sanctuary will I dress” (Keats,1820, p. 239). 

Besides, in “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”, Keats composes “when all the birds are faint with the 

hot sun, and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run”, “in summer luxury” and “on alone winter evening” 

(Keats, 1817, p. 49). All of such depiction creates the hot sunlight and the shade under the trees. The 

hot summer day and the frosty winter night and such obvious contrast of warmness and coldness can 

effectively convey to readers the infinite beauty and vigorous life of nature. 

3.2 Writing of Softness and Hardness 

The 2nd aspect sets the contrast between soft and hard colors in poetry, which the feeling of light colors 

convey the sense of softness and expansion, such as light blue and cream. The hard and soft feelings of 

color are also related to purity, since high purity and low brightness of the color bring a sense of hard 

feeling, for example, black. It can also be based on the degree of objects in order to determine the 

hardness and softness, for the stone is black and hard, but the spring is soft and flowing. 

In “Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there”, the 1st part reads as follows: “the bushes half 

leafless, and dry” with “the dead leaves rustling drearily”, and these look hard and cold. But the end the 

lyrics like “of fair-hair Milton’s eloquent distress” and “of lovely Laura in her light green dress” (Keats, 

1817, p. 46) give readers a sense of soft, gentle and elegant feeling. 

3.3 Writing of Lightness and Darkness 

The 3rdaspect lies in the contrast between lightness and darkness. There is an embodiment of the 

contrast between light and dark in “Ode to Melancholy”, the root-deep ebony head versus the pale and 

forehead, the typical opposition of black and white, as the poetry says, p. “But when the melancholy fit 

shall fall, sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud” (Keats, 1818, p. 250). It delivers Keats’s gloomy 

mood as changeable as the weather itself. In “To Byron”, Keats writes “Overshadowing sorrow doth 

not make thee less delightful” and “with a bright halo, shining beamily, as when a cloud the golden 

moon doth veil”, it “through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail” (Keats, 1817, p. 328). Keats was 19 



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years old when he wrote this poem, and the 26-year-old Byron wrote a work that moved Keats very 

much. So Keats praised him, though his opinion of Byron’s poetry changed later. 

In addition, in “O Solitude! If I Must with Thee Dwell”, which appeared in the 1816 issue of The 

Observer, John Keats adopted a set of light and dark contrasts between a bright river and a shaded bush 

of branches and leaves, and with a gradual manifestation of color, the poem delivers the poet’s view of 

solitude: “almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee” (Keats, 

1816, p. 45). 

3.4 Writing of the Foreground and Background Color 

The4thaspect lies in the contrast of foreground and background colors, and the sense of it depends on 

different frequencies of color imaging on the retina of the human eye. Generally, red, orange, yellow 

and other low frequencies of light color make people feel more imminent, while green, blue, purple and 

other high frequencies of light color make people feel more open. 

In fact, this is a phenomenon of optical illusion. Generally speaking, warm colors, pure colors, strong 

contrast colors, large area colors, etc. create an intimate sense of feeling, but on the contrary, cool 

colors, light colors, clear colors, scattered colors, etc., possess a sense of openness. This point can be 

echoed with the above-mentioned color contrast between the warm and cold, since the former will 

make people feel closer while the latter more distant. 

In “To Autumn”, Keats in the 1ststanza writes “ to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, and fill all 

fruit with ripeness to the core”, which juxtaposes the contrasting colors of the red of apple and the pale 

green and thus gives readers a sense of proximity. But in the 2ndstanza, the sentences like “thy hair 

soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep” (Keats, 1820, p. 248) 

present the golden wheat fields and the light blue creek, which gives readers a feeling of openness and 

distance, just like an observer watching the hard-working people at sunrise and sunset from afar. 

In short, the color contrasts in Keats’ poetry are strong: warmness and coldness, hardness and softness, 

lightness and darkness, foreground and background color, all of these are reflected in his poetry. They 

are not only integrated with each other and being part of his poetry, but also becoming independent of 

each other, with their own particularities and distinctions. 

The peculiarities lie in the fact that Keats focuses more on the “scene” when writing about the contrast 

between warmness and coldness and foreground and background colors, because spring and summer 

will give people a warm feeling, while autumn and winter are on the cold side. Subsequently, the 

foreground and background colors of the scenery are more likely to show readers the contrast, with the 

distant scene indistinct and vague and the near scene oppressive and massive. 

What’s more, Keats focuses more on “object” when writing about the contrast between lightness and 

darkness and hardness and softness of colors, because objects are easier to “feel” than scenes, whether 

they are tactile or visual. Keats has made good use of these skills to give his poems more character and 



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beauty. 

 

4. Origin of Keats’s Pictorial Writing 

Why does Keats’ poetry reflect such a strong pictorial nature? His personal experience in both his life 

and his poetry writing cannot be ignored essentially.  

Initially, his self-experience offers him a chance to contact the artistic world. On October 31st, 1820, 

after more than a month at sea and ten days of isolation on board, Keats and his companion Joseph 

Severn disembarks the Gulf of Naples. On that day, Keats had just turned twenty-five years old. He had 

come to recuperate from his illnessin Italy where the climate was temperate and the sea breeze fresh 

which appears in his poem: “Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, Feast them upon the 

wideness of the sea” (Keats, 1820, p. 335). 

For the 2nd generation of Romantic poets, Italy was in a sense of the spiritual homeland, the birthplace 

of the classical tradition alongside Greece and the source of the Renaissance, and in the 19th century it 

became a mandatory stop on the Grand Tour of Europe. Byron and Shelley spent much of their time 

here. Byron also called Italy “the garden of the world, the home of all art...even your weeds are 

beautiful, your barren riches, your ruins glorious, your ruins flawless” (Byron, 1812) in Childe Harold’s 

Pilgrimage. 

Near Naples, Keats saw a fresco depicting the nine muses and Apollo. It was already November, and 

there were still many flowers in bloom along the roadside, p. myrtle, laurel, cyclamen, like a garden of 

the god Pan. Keats was surprised to see roses at this time of year, so he went up to them, but found that 

they were no longer fragrant. He lamented, “what is a rose that has lost its fragrance?” At the place 

where Cicero perished, Keats remembered his 1stencounter with classical literature, and he was 

attributed by his classmates to a solid foundation in classical languages, so he chose to abandon 

medicine and devoted himself to his pursuit of poetry. This would have been Keats’ 1stencounter with 

painting, and such beautiful art unfolding before his eyes gives Keats an infinite vision of beauty, into 

which he put his future poetry. 

The subsequent source comes from his precursors and his peer poets. Keats always admires Milton, and 

his poetic technique possesses a Miltonic flavor. Milton’s poetry has been known for its pictorial nature, 

which exerts a profound influence on Keats. Keats is also influenced by Spencer and he even imitates 

him in “Imitation of Spencer”, in which Keats portrays the elegant and noble swan, which is as white as 

snow and sings to the sky with a curved neck (Cui, 2019, p. 73).  

Influenced by Milton and Milton’s ability to turn the most insufferable things into picturesque things, 

John Keats transfers his commitment to the beauty in written words. For example, both Milton and 

Keats are committed to the beauty of the images in words, as exemplified by the swan in both. In 

Milton’s writing, the white swan washes her fluffy breast on the silvery lake; she sometimes uncovers 



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her cloak-like white wings and gracefully paddles her houseboat with her paws; she also raises her 

strong feathers and leaves the water as if floating in the air. “Knowledge enormously makes a God of 

me. /Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, /Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, /Creations 

and destroying, all at once /Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, /And deify me, as if some blithe 

wine /Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, /And so become immortal—Thus the God(Keats, 1820, p. 

276). It is clear that poet’s desire to surpass his predecessors’ courage, determination and practice is 

shown.  

Besides, Keats made many friends in his life, including painter friends who are particularly close to 

him, and this also exerted an influence on his poetry. Hayden is a painter and an intimate friend of the 

Keats. In Keats’s “To Hayden”, he writes “thou hadst beheld the full Hesperian shine of their star in the 

east, and gone to worship them I” (Keats, 1820, p. 334). The great souls are said to refer to the poets 

Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Hayden. It must be said that these three men’s appreciation of painting 

also invariably influenced Keats’ aesthetic approach to painting. 

Hayden’s intense pursuit of art had a profound influence on Keats. Convinced of the educational value 

of history painting to the nation, Hayden dedicated his life to the creation of everlasting history 

paintings. On March 2, 1817, Keats visited the British Museum with Hayden and Reynolds and they 

walked through almost the entire Elgin Marble Statue Gallery. Byron was strongly opposed to 

plundering of the treasures of the Athenian Pantheon by the British. In his travels, he had rebuked Lord 

Elgin and the British government for their banditry: they see the palm trees of the English, destroy your 

walls, and tear down your decaying sanctuary, but do not weep, for their eyes are exceedingly dull. 

While Hayden argued with Richard Payne Knight about whether the statues were Roman or Greek in 

origin, Keats had long since drowned in the huge cluster of statues: serene horse heads, mutilated river 

gods, Lapidians fighting with centaurs, etc. The treasures of the great sculptor Phidias shook him:“ my 

spirit is too weak—mortality, weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep. And each imagined pinnacle 

and steep. Of godlike hardship tells me that I must die, like a sick eagle looking at the sky” (Keats, 

1817, p. 333). 

The line “the sick eagle looking at the sky” in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” conveys the honesty of 

the Romantic poet and the characteristic humility of Keats. Although it is difficult for him to reach the 

high artistic level of the ancients, he can see through these fragmented sculptures the view from before 

the beginning of time. This poem is one of the most mature Keats’ early works, and his only complete 

long poem, consisting of more than four hundred lines. Like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which traces 

different stages of spiritual growth and imaginative development. Keats sees antiquities, one after 

another, piled up into history, which has disappeared, leaving behind reality. Keats laments the artifacts 

and hates that no one can empathize with them, so he looks at these ghostly works with a “fragile 

mind”, which makes people dazzled and distressed. 



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In addition to friends, his beloved also constitutes a particular origin for his composition of paintings 

for John Keats’ life. Keats lived a short life and he unfortunately was deprived of his life at the gold age 

of 25 in 1821. Lucky for him since he met his lifelong companion—Fanny, whose heart-thumping love 

letters also brought Keats beauty and added to the pictorial nature of his poetry. Keats and Fannymet in 

spring just as a red leather diary met a stamp with a Greek lyre design, and their love sprouted. Keats 

was so excited to write these lines: “The reach of fluttering Love, and make him cower lowly while I 

soar? No, that is vulgarism, Shall I gulp wine? A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of 

love;—No,—wine is only sweet to happy men” (Keats, 1820, p. 328). A light and lovely picture of 

spring love emerge, as if the pink cherry blossoms and the bright green branches of the trees are 

intertwined. 

In “Bright Star”, Keats wishes to be as firm as a star but unwilling to hang high in the night sky alone. 

The 1sthalf of the poem is on the moor, the mountains, and the snow, creating a sense of desolation, but 

then immediately turns to warmth: The sweet breast and gentle breath of a lover. Such warmth and 

coldness make the reader feel so comfortable that they cannot help continue reading. This poetry shows 

Keats’ awareness, pursuit, and interpretation of beauty and the poetic expression and reproduction of 

beauty, showing that the poet places beauty at the center of his poetic beliefs and regards it as the true 

meaning of poetic beliefs. Keats does not deny the beauty of reality, but is more attracted to the beauty 

of the senses. He is more interested in the beauty of sense, the beauty of Greek and Roman mythology, 

and aspires to make beauty constant through imagination (Cui, 2019, p. 168). In his heart, Fanny is 

compared to the flowers that spawn love, turning into a poem that blooms on Keats’ desk. Once autumn 

arrived, the fresh scent of melons and crops replaced the flirtatious marriage of spring. One day, Keats 

met with a freshly harvested wheat field, which was gold and warm, superior to a large oil painting, 

which gave Keats an urge to embrace it and kiss it as if he could have kissed Fanny for thousands of 

times. Keats thumped his heart because Fanny was always new, as if he was seeing her for the first time 

forever. This impulse led to the later publication of “To Autumn”. In this poem, the poet sits like an elf 

in a barn and a threshing floor, picks up wheat and crosses a stream, and watches the wine drip down in 

a slow line by the fruit squeeze. In this way, a small ditty is depicted in words, and finally a succession 

of levels into one of the most beautiful pictures of autumn in the history of English literature. 

 

5. The Significance of Keats’s Pictorial Writing  

The aesthetic character of Keats’ poetry is rich in its expressions of positive democratic consciousness, 

the pursuit of freedom, equality and true love (Zhang, 2002, p. 67), which is a poetic and aesthetic 

close to perfection. 

First of all, Keats’ pursuit of true beauty is constant. From the perspective of his personal life, Keats’ 

short life was undoubtedly full of hardships and difficulties, but varied with different styles. The twists 



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and turns of Keats’s journey made him persist in eulogizing an eternal ideal, which is “beauty”. His 

long narrative Hyperion demonstrates the leading character’s fierce pursuit of the moon goddess 

Cynthia, which is a spiritual symbol of the poet’s pursuit ofpure and genuine beauty, as a common 

feature of the times. Keats claims the aesthetic principle of “beauty is truth, truth beauty” and this 

aesthetic idea of the equivalence of beauty and truth is one of the most important psychological 

qualities of Keats as a Romantic poet, which emphasizes the inevitable connection between the 

principle of factory beauty and things (Qiu, 1992, p. 46), thus giving Keats’ poetry a deeper touch of 

sincerity and sensitivity. The tremendous artistic power of Keats’ poetry comes first from his “true 

feelings”—he feels the nature, the society and the glory of art with his own heart. He once expressed 

that he could never write anything with false feelings (Oxford,1970). 

Second, Keats’ poetry is full of feelings and senses. Possessing a wealth of ideas and emotions, Keats 

possesses a keen sense of society and life. What Keatsgot was precisely an artistic space full of objects 

and emotions, with imagery becoming indispensable. For instance in “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats 

writes “O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been/Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvedearth/Tasting 

of Floraand the country green/Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth/O for a beaker full of the 

warm South/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene/with beaded bubbles winking at the brim/And 

purple-stained mouth/That I might drink, and leave the world unseen/And with thee fade away into the 

forest dim” (Keats, 1820, p. 232).Here, we cannot help but admiring the poet’s taste, for his vision and 

color sense are so delicately developed, and his association and imagination are so dense and open. In 

the flow of these sensations or images, various facets and subtle tremors of Keats’s mind are expressed 

rarely and tangibly. 

Keats isnotin his passionate love with Fanny but with quite contradictory feelings and “La Belle Dame 

Sans Merci”echoes such feelings. When this poem was written during that period, Keats and Fanny 

were passionately in love, and it is based on a 1424 French poem of the same name by the French poet 

Alain Chartier (1385-1430), but the original poem is centered on the “courtly love” and it is 

undoubtedly much deeper and darker. Keats combines the seemingly contradictory themes of love and 

death in this single work in order to achieve a powerfully contrasting effect.  

There are also strong contrasts in warmness and coldness and lightness and darkness in this poem: “I 

see a lilly on thy brow/with anguish moist and fever dew/And on thy cheek a fading rose fast withereth 

too” (Keats, 1819, p. 303). The white lily-like forehead corners and rose-colored cheeks are the use of 

color contrast, the cool color of white contrasts with the warm color of red, symbolizing death and life. 

Secondly, some expressions including “I met a lady in the meads”, “I made a garland for her head” and 

“She found me roots of relish sweet/And honey wild, and manna dew” (Keats, 1819, p. 303) illustrate 

the brightness of daily life. But in the last stanza, Keats writes “I saw pale kings, and princes too/Pale 

warriors, death-pale were they all” and “I saw their starved lips in the gloam/with horrid warning gaped 



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wide” (Keats, 1819, p. 303), which symbolizes the darkness of death in sharp contrast with the previous 

contents. The expression “quickly withering” implies the poet’s despair. So Keats’s dreams of the 

Merci Dame, and the white glowing skeleton in the darkness foreshadowed the impending disaster. The 

contrast between the withered reeds and the squirrel’s nest filled with food in the poem reflects the 

emptiness and abundance, just as the love between Keats and Fanny, since death and passionate love 

illustratethe embodiment of this contradiction. 

The plot of the poem is hidden, seemingly abrupt, but with an air of gloomy mystery that invites 

imagination. The “Merci Dame” in the poem became one of the synonyms for “serpentine beauty” in 

the literature of the 19th century European. At the time of the poem’s composition, Keats was in a sweet 

but obstructive relationship with Fanny on the one hand, and suffering from illness on the other hand 

(although tuberculosis had not yet been diagnosed), so the theme of love and death in the poem 

undoubtedly has some realistic elements, but what is more touching are the haziness, mystery and 

ambiguity. 

The picturesque writing of John Keats influences his own poetic style, and his poetry also deeply 

influences the English literature. The influences can be mainly summarized in three categories: the rich 

depiction of the senses, the idealization of the Middle Ages, and the paradoxes about art and thought, 

which were generally positive and beneficial. Keats mainly manifestshis influences on many English 

poets and their works in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. As one of the five 

major poets of the English Romantic period, Keats exerts historical importance due to three main 

reasons: first, in terms of the form and style of his poetry, he is the most romantic one of the English 

Romantic poets, and his language is opulent and flamboyant in dealing with Greek themes, without any 

restraints of Greek art. Keats is thus known as the goldsmith of language and the poet of poets. 

Second, he was indifferent to the impulses generated by the social dramas and the fraternal enthusiasm 

of the French Revolution. In his view, poetry was detached from contemporary life by going back to the 

past, and poetry itself should serve beauty entirely. Because of this, he seems bound to stand behind his 

time. 

Finally, there is a great influence on subsequent generations of poets. From the mid-nineteenth century 

to the twentieth century, Keats had had a profound influence on many poets and artists. Certainly, if we 

admit Keats is in-depth influenced by painting, then his poems represented by “La Belle Dame Sans 

Merci” also offer inspiration to other artists to produce their paintings based on his writing. A large 

number of British painters have painted various versions of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, including Sir 

Francis Bernard Dixie, President of the Royal Academy of Arts, John William Waterhouse, a former 

Raphaelite, Arthur Hughes, and Flint, a Scottish watercolorist, among others. Although Keats’s creative 

career lasted only four short years, it is evident from the continuous derivation of “La Belle Dame Sans 

Merci” over the past century that the poet’s immortal soul continues to haunt and reverberate in the 



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pantheon of generations of subsequent generations of artists. 

 

6. Conclusion 

The expression “beauty is truth, truth beauty” has been used throughout Keats’ life. Keats struggled for 

beauty throughout his life, both in his poetic writing and in his personal life. The pictorial nature of his 

poetry shows a certain extent of his relentless pursuit of beauty. By excelling in depicting natural 

scenery and the external appearance of things, expressing the sense of color and three-dimensionality 

of scenery, attaching importance to writing techniques, and pursuing flamboyant language, he greatly 

influenced the creation of lyric poetry by later generations. Rich in imagination, brilliant in color, and 

overflowing with the desire for freedom, his poetry perfectly embodies the characteristics of Western 

Romanticism and shows the progressive tendency of anti-classicism. 

 

Acknowledgement 

First of all, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude towards my academic supervisor Prof. Dan 

CUI for her invaluable instruction and inspiration, her choice of this research topic, design of paper 

structure and framework, etc. and rigorous academic attitude. My acknowledgement also goes to my 

classmates, whose support and generosity influence me so much. Last but not least, I must attribute all 

of my achievements to my family members, especially my parents， whose love always motivates me 

to hold on to my dreams. 

 

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Painting. South Central Review, 36(1). 

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Normal University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), (S1), 46-50. 

Tan, Q. L. (2010).Painting Poetry and Rewriting: A Perspective on the De-romanticization of Keats’ 

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Wang, Y. (2008). The Pursuit of Beauty in Keats’s Poetry. Time Literature (Second Half Moon), (03), 

144-145. 

Wang, Z. Y. (2014). A Multi-dimensional Painting of the Intersection of Time and Space—Keats’ “To 

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Zhang, Y. (2002). Towards a Humanism of Poetic Aesthetics: The High Integration of Social-Political 

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Note(s) 

This paper is the periodical research result of Project on “The Anxiety and Transcendence of John 

Keats’s Individual Identity Construction” sponsored by National Social Science Foundation of China 

(21FWWB015); of Project on “A Study of the Construction of John Keats’s National Identity” 

sponsored by the fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No: 2021M700496); of 

Projecton “A Study of John Keats’s National Identity Writing” sponsored by Social Science Foundation 

of Jilin Province; of Project on “A Study of English Major Course System Construction with Value 

Shaping Based on ‘Global Village’ as the Foreign Language Lab” sponsored by Foreign Language 

Teaching and Research Council, China Association of Higher Education (Grant:21WYJYZD08); 

ofProject on“A Study of Transcending Boundary of Poetry and Painting: the Pictoriality of John 

Keats’s Poetry” sponsored by Jilin International Studies University;of Project on “The Establishment 

and Practice of Vista Mode of Development and Transformation of English-major Teaching Faculty’s 

Proficiency under New Arts Prospect” sponsored by Chinese Private Higher Education 

Association(CANFZG22417); of Project on “The Construction and Practice of Mode of Development 

and Transformation of Foreign Language Teaching Faculty’s Proficiency in International Studies of 

Universities under Multiple-Discipline Background” sponsored by Jilin Higher Education Association 

(No: JGJX2022D316); of Project on“A Study on Cultivation Mechanism of Foreign Language 



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High-quality Students Based on Inter-discipline Crossover and Integration Under Value Guiding” 

sponsored by Jilin Education and Science Leading Office (WT 22143). 


