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Keats And Celtic Romanticism Summary

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In “Keats and Celtic Romanticism”, Grant F. Scott claimed that Keats 's interest was not simply artistic but there were strong contemporary political implications in his choice of embracing a culture that was pre-Roman, pre-Christian and a pre-colonized. Keats had a marginalized status as a Cockney writer in the main literary establishment which made him all the more sympathetic to the struggle of the Celts to Roman and English cultural colonization. Scott writes, “Keats 's emphasis on the Celts, Druids, and faerylore in his own poetry was a powerful defense against the depreciation of one 's self and one 's group by the patrician English ruling group in power” (Scott, Keats and Romantic Celticism by Christine Gallant, 2006, p. 226). Keats took up an idea in the Hyperion and he connected the Celts with the Titans. Scott explained that the faeries were associated with the realm of the dead and widely feared by ordinary folk. They were attractive, immoral, and dangerous lived in hills and caves or underwater and dwelt in a timeless land unfriendly to humans. The human victim was typically glamour away to fairyland or the "Otherworld", where he remained captive or was released to the human world confused or mad (226). For Keats especially the victims often come from the higher ranks of the social order - princes and princesses, highborn ladies, knights and kings. According to Scott, Keats followed Spenser and Shakespeare to represent the faeries in his Poems and Imitation of
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