존키츠의 인간화된 종교에서 고통과 구원의 의미

Abstract

Romantist questioned and doubted about the Supreme Being, or the authority of formal doctrines, such as neo-classicism and any of the ideas of the preceeding period. Post-romantist, John Keats also thought that metaphysical thought or religions could not settle the pain of the real world. He tried to find something powerful that could endow hope in human life. Although he was not a Christian, he had ideas about the spiritual world, Higher Being, Salvation, the afterlife and so on. Keats's Letters reveal a strikingly personal view of organized religion. Having dismissed the Christian model of salvation, then he offers his own system of Salvation, "a vale of Soul-making"(Letters 290). This system objects and rejects the Christian faith, and emphasizes that Salvation from a painful world was delivered by the personal experience of the Soul, and not by an external saviour. This would serve as an alternative of Christianity and provide an explanation for the mystery of earthly suffering. Keats wrote that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. . . "(Letters 289). Suffering is the inevitable human condition. Human must work out his salvation through suffering. Keats convinces that the poet should write about human suffering and human itself. He regards the poet as "humanist, Physician to all men"(CP 365). The important implication of the relationship between poet and healer is that concept of poetry as consolation. He celebrated in "Sleep and Poetry": "to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man"(43). His new poetry is based on the new humanized religion. It would bring hope and healing to a dying human world.