ABSTRACT
John Keats's delight in the phonetic qualities of verse is so well known as hardly to need mention, but some instances of his expression of this delight may be recalled. Benjamin Bailey informed Lord Houghton that One of Keats's favorite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own motives. Despite Bailey's account of Keats's theory that 'the principle of melody in verse' consisted in the interplay of vowels 'like differing notes in music', there is an obvious danger in over-emphasizing any very conscious intention behind the vowel-grouping which has been in part described. It should also be re-emphasized that any similar patterning is so rare in the verse which Keats wrote before Hyperion as to necessitate painstaking and deliberate search for its discovery; when Keats appeared to have ceased striving for the rich and weighted intensity of expression which had until that time been both a conscious and unconscious goal.
