Oscar Wilde and the heritage of John Keats: the Author as Creator and the Mission of art
The author of the article considers some aspects of the influence of the heritage of Keats, one of the original representatives of the era of romanticism in England, on the creativity and the theory of art of Oscar Wilde. Wilde wanted to see the second half of the 19th century as a new stage in “the English Renaissance of art”. He was one of the few who announced the world value of the heritage of John Keats. He believed that the poetry by Keats proves that English culture and art can be totally renewed. For Wilde, the interest in Keats was associated in the first place with the adoption of the special Mission of art and activeness and the primacy of the creative personality, which recognized the dominant aesthetic attitude to life. Wilde evaluated Keats to be the most characteristic representative of aesthetic romantic individualism. Keats persuaded Wilde that the Mission of art is to bring spirituality and beauty in real life. Wilde regarded Keats as the “Priest of beauty”. In the article, artistic details of Keats’s poetry are discussed on the basis of Wilde’s judgments about his identity as a poet. For Wilde, the Keats’s heritage was tangible evidence of the fruitfulness of the romantic interpretation of the creative personality. Poetry by Keats gave Wilde an opportunity to highlight a number of components in his own theory of romantic personality such as unique individuality, spiritual receptivity, self-sufficiency, developed aesthetic sense, clear understanding of artistic forms, and ability to universality understood as one’s ability to depict universal harmony of world and human beings, to establish connections between different images of world culture, various forms and means of art, to combine art skill and imagination in a literary work Wilde totally approved Keats’s words: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” and “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. It was his creed of the aestheticism. Wilde considered the beauty as a universal category, since it is the primary means of knowing the world. Beauty is declared the main source of inspiration of the author. The ability to understand beauty, to see it in life and art is essential quality for writer-creator. As a result, Wilde have actualized some main features of the Keats’s creativity, his heritage helped Wilde to formulate and to specify some important elements of his own romantic aesthetic conception of authorship.