ABSTRACT
Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of Keats's best poems. The Keats of the first volume, Poems, 1817, is a much different person from the Keats of the Lamia volume, in 1820. Keats's poem has a simple plot. A knight tells the poet, in response to a question as to why he was so woe-begone, that he met a fairy child and set her on his pacing steed. Keats's love of beauty has a strong sexual component. His unfulfilled physical desires were sublimated into poems worshipping beauty. Art was his refuge. The poem is the song of unsatisfied desires. Keats, frustrated in his love, had one resource, to make poetry and create beauty out of his sorrow. In the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best poems, and he showed most emphatically the repression of his emotions by the coquetries of Fanny.
