詩人ということ : キーツの場合

Abstract

Keats regarded Shakespeare as an ideal poet of no character or no identity. He called such a character as "Negative Capability" or simply "poetical character" which loves both fair and foul. Strictly speaking, however, his idea of Shakespeare was not his own but a prevailing theory since the middle of 18th century that Shakespeare was a poet of imagination. S. T. Coleridge and Hazlitt were the advocates of the theory. It can be said that Keats shared some of the poetical character which Shakespeare had possessed enormously, but he sometimes suffered from a kind of side effect of the character; an anxiety stemmed from the lack of his own identity. We know that Keats was very good at lyric but not at drama. Writing drama needs objective mind to see the world as it is and a man as he is. Though his distinction between a poet and a "dreamer" in The Fall of Hyperion is very vague, it was a great step for him to understand the relation between a poet and the world. When he was writing two "Hyperion" s, he seemed to understand that poets should be with the world.