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Haney, John Louis

"Early Reviews of English Poets"

The poetry of the work is
_contemptible_--a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other
without order, harmony, or meaning; the refuse of a schoolboy's
common-place book, full of the vulgarisms of pastoral poetry, yellow
gems and blue stars, bright Phoebus and rosy-fingered Aurora; and of
this stuff is Keats's wretched Elegy compiled.
We might add instances of like incomprehensible folly from every stanza.
A heart _keeping_, a mute _sleep_, and death _feeding_ on a mute
_voice_, occur in one verse (page 8); Spring in despair "throws down her
_kindling_ buds as if she Autumn were," a thing we never knew Autumn do
with buds of any sort, the kindling kind being unknown to our botany; a
_green lizard_ is like an _unimprisoned flame_, _waking_ out of its
_trance_ (page 13). In the same page the _leprous corpse_ touched by the
tender spirit of Spring, so as to exhale itself in flowers, is compared
to "_incarnations of the stars, when splendour is changed to
fragrance_!!!" Urania (page 15) _wounds_ the "invisible palms" of her
tender feet by treading on human hearts as she journeys to see the
corpse.


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