摘要：John Keats, the great literary figure of Romanticism in the 19th century, was the one whose name was written in water. This essay tries to approach Keats’s poetry from the perspective of Kant, the forefather of German Classical Philosophy by providing examples to show their great aesthetic features. The features can be summarized as follows:a poet should have negative capability, the ability enabling him to remain an aesthetic distance instead of using literature for utilitarian purpose; the revealing of experience of beauty that intimates the harmony within man’s dual nature as free and physical being; the superiority of man’s cognitive power, especially imagination and fancy, over the power of sensibility; transcendence from the sensory to the supersensible through taste or experience of beauty, and for himself, poetry.
