ABSTRACT
To many critics, John Keats has seemed the clearest example of an English romantic poet. He attacked Alexander Pope and the 'classical' school, abandoned the traditional forms of poetry, cultivated a hazardous excess in expression, and, so the account runs, advocated a theory of beauty which excludes any obligation to moral values, or a conception of a social order. Keats's exploitation of melodious verse and sensuous phrasing encouraged poets from Tennyson onwards to regard these as the sole objectives of poetical diction. Keats had a wider influence on nineteenth-century romanticism than any other poet of his generation, and it was encouraged by the superficial similarity between his work and Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Christabel. Keats, himself, did not achieve that Shakespearian character: he does not proceed from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Troilus and Cressida and King Lear. Much in Keats's verse may offend, just as the Fanny Brawne letters offended Matthew Arnold, by a spurious intensity and fevered excitability.
