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The Issue Of Youth And Age In Geoffrey Chaucer And John Keats 2006 Table Of ...

The research compares and contrasts the use of youth and age in Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Miller's Tale, The Wife of Bath and John Keats' poems The Eve of St. Agnes and Ode to a Nightingale. Applying to the comparative approach and the qualitative method, the analysis investigates in depth the poets' treatment of youth and age as the collision of opposites. The received findings provide valid data to support the hypothesis of the research, revealing certain similar and dissimilar features of poets' visions. In view of these data, Keats' poems regard these opposites as interrelated, while Chaucer's poetic works demonstrate a distance between youth and age.

1 Statement of Hypothesis

The juxtaposition of youth and age in Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Miller's Tale, The Wife of Bath and John Keats' poems The Eve of St. Agnes and Ode to a Nightingale is presented as the collision of opposites that is uncovered through the transition from youth to old age. The present analysis supports the hypothesis that the correlation between two opposites in the works of Chaucer and Keats reflects the poets' philosophical insights and their unique understanding of reality. Despite the fact that Chaucer's poetry belongs to the medieval era and Keats' poems reveal the era of Romanticism, the poets' utilisation of the topos of youth versus age has many similar characteristics.

2 Literature Review

The works of John Keats and Geoffrey Chaucer have always been exposed to severe criticism. The interest of critics to these poets has produced contradictory interpretations and assumptions. In particular, John Keats was presented as a poet that was lost in his dreams and further as a person who was obsessed with certain ideas. Unlike some earlier criticism of Keats' poetry that regarded Ode to a Nightingale as a work that lacks any integrity, Leavis (1962) points at the fact that this poem "has a structure of a fine and complex organism (p.315). The similar viewpoint is expressed by Khan (2002) who states that Keats' unique aesthetic accomplishment [gives] the work the status of a self-sufficient and self-sustained entity, defined by its own internal laws of contextual coherence and linguistic patterns" (p.80). In regard to Keats' poem The Eve of St. Agnes, Stillinger (1999) claims that more than fifty interpretations have been proposed, but the chief responsibility for understanding the poem continues to lie with the reader, where Keats lodged it from the beginning (p.33). Thus, Stillinger (1999) goes beyond the traditional interpretation of The Eve of St.

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