Work of the principal of the Romantic movement of England received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day during his short life. He nevertheless posthumously immensely influenced poets, such as Alfred Tennyson. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize poetry, including a series of odes, masterpieces of Keats among the most popular poems in English literature. Most celebrated letters of Keats expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability."
(re-reading) July 2012 Fantastic! The alliance between beauty and the death instinct in a bright & depressive poetry. We should read the Romantics after the Surrealists.
"I have been half in love with easeful Death." "Now more than ever seems it rich to die." "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter." "For shade to shade will come too drowwsily,/ And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul." "She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die." "... in the very temple of Delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine." "How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self." The Truth: "The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry,/ I cannot see - but darkness, death and darkness."