Can you give us an example of what you mean? What in his poetry equqates to a "Catholic sensibility"--what does a Catholic sensibility look like in terms of poetical style? (Guess I'm still confused.)
Well, as a Catholic (and poet-playwright) I tend to notice those creative works which use 'Catholic' ideas or images or cultural references. As someone active in corresponding with other writers and readers of like ilk and inclination, there has been much discussion on the effective use and ineffective use of these metaphors and settings.
I have always sensed (for the record, I am not a Papist or pre-Vatican II traditionalist: I married a Jew) that the writer is most effective when subtle and evocative of whatever image (for lack of a better word at this time) is being brought to the fore of the viewer's or reader's attention.
By way of illustration:
Mean Streets is a good Catholic film for many reasons.
Going My Way and
The Bells of St Mary's are not good Catholic films for the same reasons.
The Eve of Saint Agnes and many passage in some of the other longer poems bespeaks that sensibility to me. It is not some secret code, it is a sense about the sacramental nature of life and the immanence of God.
Keats' poems (the best ones I think) operate at this level.
To me it seems the origins and raw power of religion are at the imaginative level for the individual believer and the tradition.
Keats is in the tradition of Milton and Shakespeare and Chapman (yes, an underrated Elizabethan IMHO). He knows "how to make it new" (kudos to Pound) and make it part of the tradition.
His Romantic sensibility is not that of the poetaster school: dryads and other 'pagan' traditions and types are used for 'modern' effect.
I'm sorry if I seem not to be connecting here with you about this, but Keats' poems accentuate the immanence of Creation: the here and now of the beauty of the flowers, the snow seen by moonlight, the chase forever still on the urn.
Now how does George's immigration and Keats's writing plays have to do with the Catholic faith?
It's not the FAITH, it is the sensibility that I meant to be understood. George's move and John's flirting with playcraft shows that nervousness, that creative desire (a family trait?) to enlarge one's view, one's worldview and take in more. And, in Keats' instance, to expand HIS art into that inspiring immanence.
This seems like a leap of logic to me--just because artists lived in Catholic countries doesn't mean that they embraced the faith
No, some have even "lost" or ignored it (Joyce and Beckett, for example). Some who are not even Catholic pretend to know it (like Yeats and Eliot).
With Keats, I meant this comment as a starting point to discuss a maturing sensibility in his poetry and life. Distance from England (remember Byron's cartoon showing him "shaking the dust off his boots?") would have worked wonders had he lived ten times the hundred days he lived.
And the life of Rome and the traditions of Italy and those environs (he would have delved into Petrarca and Dante, and thus be confronted with questions of religion) would have affected him CULTURALLY.
) I have never heard of such a film. But then again, I'm not really "up" on movies.
Suffice it to say, whenever I read them I get a visceral experience out of it!
). I'm slow going through his work, because I keep re-reading my favorites before moving on to the next.