Lonliness and Suffering in Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, although Rousseau promotes the intellectual development, which flourished during the Enlightenment of the 18th century and Keats contemplates life through emotional expressions, which dominated Romanticism of the 19th century; there is a distinct stream of Romanticist in both their writings as seen in Rousseau's "Confessions" (a century before Keats) and Keats' "Ode on Melancholy". The author points out that Keats' thesis that humanity must first dwell on loneliness in order to appreciate joy and beauty --humanity's "Dark Age" -- is similar to Jean Jacques Rousseau's recollection of his path towards intellectual development in his "Confessions". The paper reveals that, to truly experience self-actualization in life, both Keats and Rousseau subsisted to the belief that suffering and loneliness allow humanity to realize its fullest potential in life.

From the Paper:

"The last stanza reflected the poet's motivation for creating the theme of loneliness in the poem. In it, Keats showed how loneliness is inevitable, mainly because joy and beauty exists in life. It is only in joy and beauty, according to the poem, that loneliness exists and thrives: "She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu..." Thus, because joy and beauty are essential experiences in the life of humanity, and because joy and beauty cannot exist without loneliness, loneliness then becomes inevitable. What Keats meant in his poem is that, in order to realize what we have in life, there must be an opposing and negative experience to both joy and beauty that would not make these positive experiences taken for granted."

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