Escapism through Poetry Anonymous 12th Grade

Keats evidently uses his poetry as a form of escapism, thus valuing emotions and imagination over logic an reality, as he is able to craft his own form of reality through his writing. Many have speculated that this is due to his, arguably, traumatic life which was centered around a plethora of familial deaths and disease, thus presenting Keats with the need to escape to a more positive reality, as opposed to the harsh, unforgiving one of genuine reality. This is reiterated bye Cleaneth Brooks, who commented: “The world of imagination provides a release from the painful world of actuality.”

Ode to Psyche clearly depicts Keats as using mythology and imagination in order to confess his love for a girl, which is believed to have been his contemporary lover, Fanny Brawne. Through opening the poem with ‘O Goddess!’, the narrator is immediately proving that he values emotion and imagination over reality, through comparing Brawne to the goddess Psyche. In the poem, Keats later describes how the ‘latest born and loveliest vision far / of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!” This simultaneously demonstrates the extent of the narrators love for the female character, whilst also proving how emotion drove the poem away from logic, as the poet is...