POETRY AS A THERAPY IN THE CONTEXT OF JOHN KEATS

ABSTRACT

John Keats (1795-1821), the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet was trained to be a physician but his passion for writing poetry prevailed over the profession of following a career in medicine. He taught the world how to treat the distressed and the dejected souls with poetry , as he believed that poetry could be a panacea for the sick mankind. For him a poet is not a ‘lotus-eater’ or a dreamer of dreams; he is not a fugitive, whiling his time in an ivory-tower; he is not a shallow idealist frittering away his life in abstract idle pursuits; rather the poet is a physician who uses his poetry as a therapy to heal the disease and sickness from within. His critics hounded him and did not accord him the distinction he so eminently deserved. In my paper I focus on this healing aspect of Keats’s poetry to suggest that he is very much relevant to our troubled times.

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