What is escapism?

Escapism is the desire or tendency to escape from the realities of life into fantasy. It implies aloofness from the hard reality of life and an attempt to escape into the world of imagination. The real world is full of sorrow and suffering, frustration and pain. Moreover, it is a world of change where everything is transitory and short-lived — beauty, love and youth—everything suffers from destruction and decay. But the poets can create with the help of their imagination a new ideal world where everything is beautiful and permanent. This tendency of living in an imaginary world avoiding the hard realities of life is termed as escapism. 

Critics have called Keats an escapist because he escapes from the hard realities of life into the beauty of the old Greece, and into the romance of the Middle Ages. He keeps himself aloof and detached from the suffering humanity. He lives in an ivory tower. Wordsworth also escaped to the world of nature; Coleridge sought refuge in the supernatural; Shelley soared higher and higher in the aerial world of his Utopian ideas.