In this passage we observe the strength of Keats running to seed. Phrases like “plead yourself” and “labyrinth you” go beyond the limits of poetical license; and the whole passage in conception resembles the conceits of the Caroline poets rather than the finer and stronger flights of imagination of which Keats was so thoroughly capable.
Together with the longer poems are many shorter pieces of supreme beauty. The great odes—To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn—were nearly all written in 1819. Among the other shorter poems La Belle Dame sans Merci, a kind of lyrical ballad, is considered to be one of the choicest in the language.
In 1819 Keats collaborated in a drama, Otho the Great, and began another, King Stephen, which he did not complete. Neither effort is of much consequence. The Cap and Bells, a longish fairy-tale which also is unfinished, is much below the level of his usual work.
3. Features of his Poetry. (a) His style should be considered first, for Keats is above all a stylist. The typical Keatsian poetry is, one imagines, the ideal of what is popularly considered to be “poetry”: it is gorgeously attractive, with its melodic beauty and sensuous passion; soft and caressing, like velvet; and richly colored and odorous. At its very best the spell of it works like a divine enchantment; but at even a little less than the best it becomes unctuous, sickly, and stuffily uncomfortable. There can be little doubt that Keats’s physical malady shows itself in his writings. With all their genius, they are the work of an unhealthy brain. His heroes are languid and neurotic creatures, and his style is attuned to their swoons and faintings. A stanza from Isabella will illustrate what has already been exemplified in the verse we have quoted from The Eve of St. Agnes:
So once more had he waked and anguished
A dreary night of love and misery,
If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
To every symbol on his forehead high;
She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
And straight all flushed; so, lisped tenderly,