Ruskin’s Keats: A Joy For Ever (and its Price in the Market), “The Mystery of Life and its Arts”, and the Resonance of the Severn Circle

This chapter discusses the ongoing influence of John Keats poetry on a wide range of John Ruskin work, from his masterpiece Modern Painters to Lectures on Architecture and Painting and Academy Notes, placing particular focus on his lecture “The Mystery of Life and its Arts”. Ruskin’s interest in the writings of Keats was nurtured in his childhood and youth. From the Romantic poet he inherited a reverence for the beauties and complexities of both the natural and the artistic worlds, and he not only celebrated those ‘modern painters’ that were so dear to his heart but also “interacted with his ‘modern poets’". Ruskin’s understanding of these poems brings into sharp relief his own awareness of what he thought to be Keats’s best art, and it might be assumed that his choice of poems establishes a central component of the relationship between the two writers. The balance between economy and moral values is constant in Ruskin, albeit with some significant changes.