of style would have further developed.

Almost all of Keats' poems are exquisite and luxuriant in their embodiment
of sensuous beauty, but 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' in Spenser's richly
lingering stanza, must be especially mentioned.

2. Keats is one of the supreme masters of poetic expression, expression the
most beautiful, apt, vivid, condensed, and imaginatively suggestive. His
poems are noble storehouses of such lines as these:


The music, yearning like a God in pain.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet.

magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

It is primarily in this respect that he has been the teacher of later
poets.

3. Keats never attained dramatic or narrative power or skill in the
presentation of individual character. In place of these elements he has the
lyric gift of rendering moods. Aside from ecstatic delight, these are
mostly moods of pensiveness, languor, or romantic sadness, like the one so
magically suggested in the 'Ode to a Nightingale,' of Ruth standing lonely
and 'in tears amid the alien corn.'

4. Conspicuous in Keats is his spiritual kinship with the ancient Greeks.