When I first studied Romanticism, I didn't think that the works of Locke and Berkeley could have influenced this artistic movement. Indeed romantic poets, such as John Keats, reveal their concerns with the British Empiricist. Claims that the external world, which constituted the content of poetry before the 17th century, altered. John Keats in his poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn" reflects this reaction by turning inward to the attractive domain invulnerable to philosophic speculations.
             Midway in the 17th century John Locke criticized the naive notion of perception and started the philosophical movement known as British Empiricism. He stated that knowledge comes from experience. He had a different opinion from the Continental Rationalists about where knowledge starts: the Rationalists thought that knowledge comes from fundamental concepts and innate ideas intuitively known through reason. Instead, Locke rejected the presence of innate ideas and said that at birth human reason is a tabula rasa. He believed that knowledge comes from the sense experience and from internal motions of the soul, which include emotions and sentiments. Berkeley, another empiricist, went further arguing that something exists only when it is perceived by a mind, thus esse est percipit.
             John Keats reacted to these philosophic beliefs turning inward and writing about emotions, which cannot be proved to not exist. This is evident in his poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn". The poet describes the urn from a sentimental point of view; he expresses his feelings seeing in his mind's eye what is behind the images. Although he says that the pictures on the urn cannot "express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme", he gives perfection to those images by writing this poem so that when it is read, his emotions are recalled by the reader (3-4).
             On the urn there are represented several images of life scenes. From these, Keats imagines the hidden story and recreates in his i...