Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flowery mead in May--
If she think not well of me
What care I how fair she be?

To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to
Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference
which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have,
from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy
with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent
note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this
particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is
related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of
poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it
would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
pleasure more readily from

Shall I, wasting in despair

than from

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show
him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its
expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so
adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less
surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment