Sensuousness in Keats' Poetry

KEATS’ SENSUOUSNESS   John Keats is generally known as a poet of senses. All poetry proceeds with sense impression and all poets are more or less sensuous.   Almost every reader of poetry might have read the phrases like ‘White a Lily’, ‘Cool as Evening Air’, ‘Sound of Bells’, Tasting as Honey’ and ‘Smell of Roses’. These similes appeal to our different senses. Keats is pre-eminently the poet of senses and their delights. No one has composed to gratify the five senses to the same extent as does Keats.   Impression of senses are in fact the starting point of poetic process. The emotional and imaginative reaction to poet’s senses generates poetry. Wordsworth’s imagination was stirred up by what he saw or heard in nature. Milton was no less sensitive to the beauty of flowers than Keats. The description of flowers in the Garden of Eden in ‘The Paradise Lost’ bears the witness of Milton’s sensuousness.   There are three levels of human perception e.g., sensuous, intellectual, and intuitive.