ACCORDING to George Bernard Shaw, John Keats “achieved the very curious feat of writing a poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined writing a poem instead of a treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella.”

Shaw’s view clashes with that of most mainstream critics, who deny Keats any political thought and declare him a worshipper of some unspecified “beauty.” But the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death on February 23 at the age of only 25 is an opportunity to reclaim the reputation of this revolutionary romantic.

In his time, the implications of the English and then the American and French revolutions, heralding the arrival of capitalist society in Europe and elsewhere, were understood and feared by conservative governments across Europe.

They reacted with increased suppression of democratic movements and Britain, already a bourgeois society, now feared insurrection by the working classes and became a repressive regime.

The poetry of  English and Scottish Romanticism is the first expression of radical self-criticism of a post-revolutionary and increasingly industrial capitalist society. The vision of its most advanced proponents such as Percy Bysshe Shelley reaches beyond bourgeois society and nurtures the first of the working-class movements, the Chartists.

When the Frame-Breaking Act of 1812 made the destruction of mechanised looms a capital crime, the poet Lord Byron used his 1812 maiden speech in the House of Lords to side with working people against this government tyranny.

But fellow poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined the conservative establishment and argued for repression, restoration and counter-revolution, for which Byron took them to task in his opening stanzas of Don Juan.

Keats stands alongside Shelley and Byron as an upright defender of humankind, against its enslavement and destruction. Born and educated in the Dissenter tradition, Keats became an apothecary — a doctor for the poor — and when he left medicine for poetry, he entered the circle of the radical writer Leigh Hunt.

Other members of this group were the brilliant critic, Dissenter and radical William Hazlitt, painters Benjamin Robert Haydon and Joseph Severn — the latter would eventually accompany Keats on his final journey to Italy — John Hamilton Reynolds, who shared Keats’s religious disbelief, and Shelley.

Two of the poems written at this time, Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition and To Kosciusko, co-written with Coleridge and Hunt, express themes that would be part of his continuing principled stand against the Christian religion and in favour of an international outlook on politics.

Keats challenges the inherent asceticism of many monotheistic religions, with their promise of a better afterlife. His poetry is of this world and implicitly contrasts Christian belief with the pleasure-affirming elements of pagan beliefs, which is why they feature so strongly in his poetry.

Like Shelley and Byron, Keats saw the reactionary role played by the Christian churches in 19th-century revolutionary Europe as conservative, controlling and intrinsically anti-life. This conviction marks Keats’s entire work.

While Keats’s most accomplished poetry contains these ideas in a less overt form, they are nonetheless present, and were easily understood by the Tory press, who dismissed him as a “Cockney poet.”

In the poem Isabella, Keats describes ruthless global exploitation in mines, factories, rivers and at sea — something we easily recognise today. While these stanzas are unusually direct for Keats, he evokes an aspect that becomes increasingly central to his poetic idea: how the human senses are destroyed in what he refers to as the “barbaric age” of capitalism. He captures and depicts these times as inappropriate to humanity.

Ode to a Nightingale is heartbreaking in its description of an unnatural world, “Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes” and the concept of beauty evolves as Keats’s measure for a humane world.

A profit-driven society that insatiably pursues money at all costs, including brutal repression and wars, destroys beauty. In Isabella, Keats remarks that in a society such as this this, “the Ceylon diver... went all naked to the hungry shark;/For them [the rich] his ears gush’d blood.”

Here, “but to think is to be full of sorrow” yet, despite it all, Keats shows that beauty arises as human potential, over and over again with every new generation. Beauty is felt through the senses and for Keats, fully realised human potential means humans can appreciate the world through them.

Though capitalism destroys the senses — loins and ears gush blood, eyes are “hollow” and “leaden” — the building blocks exist for humanity to experience the beauty of a humanised world but, in the world as it is, this potential is thwarted.

Keats focused his poetics on what defined a truly human world, a place where humans are at one with themselves and their environment. He believed that human beings could only develop their full sensuous potential in a world with which they were at one, though in the world of 19th-century Britain and Europe, this was patently impossible.

Keats explores the nature of beauty in his great odes of 1819. Ode to Psyche is about the poet’s calling as priest of the human soul, while in Ode to a Nightingale beauty exists only in nature and in the integrated village community. These spheres clash with his life experience, where beauty expires. The beauty found in the nightingale’s world ought properly to exist in all of life.

Ode on a Grecian Urn examines the function of visual art and its relationship to poetry and life. Visual art can fix and freeze for eternity moments of the highest vitality and creativity but it lacks life’s pulse and, while it sharpens awareness of life’s dynamism, it cannot substitute it.

The implicit comparison between sculpture and verse in this ode reveals the poet’s growing certainty that his own art form is better suited to embody life’s processes.

Some of the images in Ode on Melancholy demonstrate the ability of verse to capture and preserve dynamic processes. The true culmination of beauty exists in natural life and, experiencing its highest intensity, defines its passing, to “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.” In the dialectics of natural life true melancholy is found, if one is prepared to face life in all its complexity and contradiction.

To Autumn brings the themes of beauty and the function and possibilities of poetry, to their conclusion. Truth lies in natural life’s process and universality, in its material totality and total materiality. The life of nature is hence a paradigm for human life.

For Keats, beauty is intrinsic to life as it should be  — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” Ode on a Grecian Urn concludes — where humans and nature are in complete harmony with one another. Beauty is dynamic and changeable and its fulfilment is life in tune with itself. To achieve this, is the meaning of life.

Keats’s affirmation of human sensuality, the ability to engage all the senses in appropriating the world around, is linked to his vision of a society where nature and humankind are at one. That is the true home for humankind.

Jenny Farrell is the author of Revolutionary Romanticism: Examining the Odes of John Keats (Nuascealta, 2017). This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Culture Matters, culturematters.org.uk