Exploring Aesthetic Philosophy in Romantic Poetry: Kantian and Hegelian Ideas in John Keats’ Works

Abstract

Abstract. This study explores the intersection of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetic philosophies in three major poems by John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and To Autumn. Using qualitative-descriptive methods and close reading analysis, this study examines how the poetic imagery, emotional depth, and metaphysical reflections in Keats’s poems resonate with Immanuel Kant’s concepts of purposiveness without purpose, disinterested pleasure, and the universality of aesthetic judgment, as well as with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ideas of the unity of the Ideal, the manifestation of Spirit (Geist), and beauty as the sensuous appearance of the Idea. The findings show that Ode to a Nightingale manifests Kant’s disinterested contemplation, while also embodying the Hegelian notion of self-denial and the longing for unity with the Absolute. La Belle Dame sans Merci demonstrates the tension between subjective aesthetic pleasure and the Hegelian tragic conflict of desire, when the harmony between sensuous beauty and rational spirit collapses. In To Autumn, Keats presents a synthesis between Kantian harmony and Hegelian concrete universalism through balanced imagery of nature, so that beauty is present as both an experience and a conceptual unity. This study concludes that Keats’s Romantic vision does not only favor one aesthetic framework, but rather presents a dynamic interaction between Kant’s epistemological detachment and Hegel’s metaphysical embodiment, which ultimately enriches the understanding of beauty, truth, and human experience in his works.