Keats: The Religious Sense

John Keats (1795–1821) was an earnest seeker after truth who believed in the existence of a Supreme Being and felt a need to investigate the consequences and ramifications of that belief. Keats: The Religious Sense reconstructs the historical, social, and intellectual environment that fostered Keats’s religious convictions and describes the faith he adopted for himself. In this landmark book, Robert Ryan follows Keats’s religious development through its observable chronological stages, beginning with the process by which he abandoned the Christian faith of his upbringing. Ryan shows how religious speculation and discussion played a significant formative role in the poet’s intellectual development, especially in the years of his greatest achievement, and argues that Keats’s critical judgments of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth—as well as some of his famous theoretical pronouncements on poetry, including his remarks on “negative capability” and “the truth of Imagination”—cannot be fully understood without understanding the religious context in which they were made.