Poetics of Transcendence: Nature, Aesthetic Knowledge, and Cultural Ontology in Rabindranath Tagore and John Keats

ABSTRACT

Abstract: This paper undertakes a comparative examination of Rabindranath Tagore and John Keats by rethinking nature not merely as a poetic motif but as a site of aesthetic knowledge and transcendental inquiry. While existing scholarship frequently aligns Tagore with European Romanticism or treats Keats within the confines of English literary tradition, such approaches often overlook the fundamentally different ontological and epistemological assumptions that inform their poetic engagements with nature. Drawing on close readings of selected poems from Gitanjali, Stray Birds, and Keats’s major odes, this study argues that Keats conceptualizes nature as a sensuous and imaginative medium through which aesthetic transcendence is momentarily achieved, whereas Tagore envisions nature as an organically spiritual presence embedded within a metaphysics of unity. By situating Keats within the framework of Romantic imagination and Negative Capability, and Tagore within Indic philosophical traditions shaped by Upanishadic and Bhakti thought, the paper develops a cross-cultural hermeneutic model that foregrounds cultural ontology as a decisive factor in poetic meaning-making. This comparative approach reveals that the poets’ shared preoccupation with beauty and impermanence leads to divergent modes of transcendence—one grounded in aesthetic intensity and imaginative suspension, the other in spiritual continuity and relational being. In re-evaluating the poetics of nature across these two literary traditions, the study challenges Eurocentric paradigms of Romanticism and contributes to a more inclusive understanding of world poetry as a field shaped by multiple, culturally embedded epistemologies.

Keywords: Comparative Poetics, Nature and Transcendence, Aesthetic Knowledge, Cultural Ontology, Romanticism and World Literature, Rabindranath Tagore and John Keats.