As one of the canonical Romantic poets, John Keats creates a pictorial and lyrical world imbued with meditative speculation on the beauty of nature and the fusion of separate self with natural sublimity in his writing. The unsettled disputation in Keats scholarship lies in the lauding of his intellectual and ideological weight versus the reduction of the poet as effete, escapist, and morally weak. As Keats’s brief life was afflicted with illness and poverty as well as a series of losses, he had direct observation and experience of suffering. Central to his poems and letters are the reflections on death, decay, and mutability, and ways to battle against them. What starts as his personal lamentation over suffering addresses the predicament of all sentient beings.
Based on the scholarly trend towards unearthing Buddhist philosophy em- bedded in Romantic literature, this study aims to explore the compatibility between Keats’s thoughts and the main concern in Buddhism: suffering and cessation of suffering. Arguably, Keats exhibits the sufferings of pain, change, and conditionality in Dharma while his strategy to cease suffering evokes Buddhist conceptions such as emptiness, interbeing, mindfulness, and enlightenment. Read under a Buddhist lens, Keats’s poetic world of intense beauty is not an escapist’s shelter but a secular religion that provides solace for tormented hearts.
