존 키츠와 월러스 스티븐스의 ‘낙원’

Paradise in the Poetry of Keats and Stevens

It is interesting to compare John Keats and Wallace Stevens on a viewpoint of paradise. Both of them made their own peculiar paradises; Keats’s is an innocent and fantastic one and Stevens’s comparatively a realistic one. We can read it in their well known poems entitled “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Sunday Morning.” Keats has a fantastic view of his paradise but Stevens is sarcastic and critical to the traditional Christian paradise. Keats is rather idealistic in his artistic creation and he imagined a paradise through a singing nightingale or Greek mythic world. He evaluated the immortality of art and singing bird. Stevens created a common woman enjoying a glass of tea and a yellow parrot popping on the floor in “Sunday Morning.” She thinks of a traditional paradise full of the boring idleness, highly appreciating the instant beauty which is dying every minute. She even thinks this world is beautiful owing to the death or extinction: Stevens checked out the idleness of paradise without circulation of death and birth. Keats created the romantic paradise and Stevens the disillusioned realistic paradise of the 20th century.