Scarica Beauty in English Literature e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Beauty in English Literature John Keats He was born in London in 1795 and died in Rome in 1821. His poetry is much quieter and more subtle than the other poets’ of the romantic age. He has no moral or political purpose and he doesn’t want to shock or to show how clever he is. He is more interested in the sensuous qualities of poetry. He thinks art is a separate realm. Baudelaire in the 19th century says ‘’art for art’s sake’’. The immortal perfection of the art’s world fascinates us, but it is lifeless and artificial, seducing us away from the possibilities of our own lived experience. Ode on a Grecian urn He wrote this poem after he visited the British Museum. Negative capability: the artist denied his capability and his personality to describe art Keats’ poems reflect on the immortality and perfection of art versus the transience of life in a way which also on its own creation. The Greek urn is decorated with different scenes and represents a perfect work of art. The figures on the urn are eternal but there is a price to pay for eternity. The figures on the urn are frozen in a state of beauty but at the same time, they are cold. Art may be eternal but it also means death and silence. Life inevitably decays. ‘’Beauty is truth, truth is beauty’’ He distinguished two types of beauty: material beauty, that is mortal, it decays and spiritual beauty, that’s immortal and takes inspiration from friendship and love. Oscar Wilde He was born in 1854 in Dublin and died in 1900 in Paris. He is considered the father of the aesthetic movement. Wilde is much closer to the ideas of French symbolist poet such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme. The preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a manifesto of the aesthetic movement, and it expresses Wilde’s idea of art in general. The artist is the creator of beautiful things, to reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim, there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. All art is useless. Art can no longer be judged on a moral basis, but only on an aesthetic one, reflecting the motto of aestheticism “Art for art’s sake’’ The picture of Dorian Gray Dorian makes a Faustian pact with an absent devil: his own life becomes an unchanging and untouchable work of art, while his portrait becomes the mirror of his real inner soul. Dorian considers his fascination with evil as part of a larger project to spiritualize the sense. Wilde’s main character, Dorian Gray, lives a life of pure pleasure, free from moralizing, and becomes interested only in that which is beautiful. According to aesthetic conception, art expresses the nature of Beauty and its differences from truth and morality. It is a form of perfection untied from reality that "reveals everything because it expresses nothing". But in the novel, Dorian is the metaphorical representation of Beauty while art becomes the mirror of reality, reflecting his soul and his true self. The moral of the novel is that art is eternal and
