Criticism Of Keats' Melancholy

Part I of Essay
After reading the title of John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” I was immediately intrigued. I thought it odd to base a poem on the feeling of melancholy. The poem touched me and after I completed reading it, I felt depressed and sad. I feel that it was Keats’s choice and ....

Part II of Essay
.... convinced me that Robert Burton had an influence on Keats’s poem. In Keats’s Ode on Melancholy, Gaillard explains that the original “Melancholy” was composed of four stanzas, the first of which Keats’s decided to remove before the poem was published. According to Gaillard, the original “stanza did survive in Brown’s transcripts, but many critics have made only passing references to it, avoiding discussion of the structure, language, theme and imagery of the poem as a full four-stanza work”(19). Gaillard believes that the deleted first stanz ....