Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.12
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7196-6690The paper compares the poetry of John Keats and Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz through three connected ideas: romantic imagination, melancholy, and social consciousness. Although the poets belong to different languages, centuries, and political settings, both turn intense feeling into a musical and image-rich poetic form. While Keats usually begins with sensory beauty and moves toward questions of mortality, transience, art, and the limits of imaginative escape, Majaz similarly begins with beauty, love, music, and loneliness, but his lyric voice repeatedly enters the modern city and confronts gender restriction, political domination, and class inequality. The paper argues that Majaz does not merely repeat European Romanticism in Urdu; rather, he revises romantic longing by directing private sorrow toward collective awakening and revolutionary possibility. At the same time, Keats is not treated as an apolitical worshipper of beauty; his poems show a serious awareness of human suffering and the fragile conditions under which beauty is experienced. By analysing Keats's major odes and Majaz's poems such as “Vagabond,” “The Traveller,” “Revolution,” “Broken Lute,” and “To the Young Lady,” the paper identifies a shared poetics of longing but two different destinations for it: aesthetic understanding in Keats and socially engaged transformation in Majaz. Ultimately, this comparative approach helps in placing English Romanticism and Urdu progressive poetry in a relation of creative dialogue rather than influence alone.
Malik, Abdul Rouf. “From Sensuous Beauty to Revolutionary Longing: A Comparative Study of Romanticism, Melancholy, and Social Consciousness in the Poetry of John Keats and Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 165-89, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.12.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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