Cruel criticisms
of his poetry hurt him at the same time, and he was in trouble
about money, for the family guardian had not proved a good
manager. And now to this already overcharged heart something
else was added. Keats fell in love. The lady he loved was young
and beautiful, but commonplace. Keats himself describes her when
he first met her as "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly,
fashionable, and strange." Her beauty and strangeness won for
her a way to the poet's heart. Love, however, brought to him no
joyful rest, but rather passionate, jealous restlessness. Yet in
spite of all his troubles, Keats continued to write poems which
will ever be remembered as among the most beautiful in our
language.
Like Scott and Byron, Keats wrote metrical romances. One of
these, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, is founded upon a tale of
Boccaccio, that old master to whom so many poets have gone for
inspiration. In Keats's romances there is no war-cry, no clash
of swords as in Scott's, and the luxury is altogether different
from Byron's.
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