Authors: Research Scholar Risha Ghosh, Professor Dr. Anushruti
Abstract: John Keats's landscapes are often discussed through either the sublime or the pastoral, a division that obscures how his poetry makes the two modes mutually constitutive. This article examines the formal and philosophical work performed by their interaction in Hyperion, "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn." It addresses a gap between sublime-centred accounts of Keatsian transcendence, pastoral readings of sensuous retreat, and ecocritical approaches that question Romantic nature as an idealised refuge. The study uses a qualitative-dominant comparative design combining close reading, a transparent coding scheme for sublime and pastoral markers, contextual interpretation, and comparison with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Shelley's "Mont Blanc," and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." The coded corpus indicates that sublime markers occur at approximately twice the frequency of pastoral markers, while thematic coding identifies transience, mortality, and artistic aspiration as the principal sites at which the modes converge. The numerical pattern is treated as descriptive evidence rather than as a substitute for interpretation. In Hyperion, pastoral remnants render cosmic defeat ethically and affectively legible; in "Ode to a Nightingale," sensuous woodland intimacy enables but also limits imaginative flight; and in "To Autumn," pastoral plenitude becomes inseparable from temporal decline. Across the corpus, negative capability operates not merely as a psychological disposition but as a formal ecology of unresolved relations. The article contributes the concept of mediated sublimity: Keats's sublime acquires force through intimate, embodied, and seasonal forms that prevent grandeur from becoming abstract mastery. This framework clarifies Keats's distinctiveness within Romantic landscape poetry and supports an ecocritical reading attentive to vulnerability, temporal interdependence, and the more-than-human world.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23728239
