By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (‘the beautiful lady without mercy’) is one of John Keats’s best-loved and most widely anthologised poems; after his odes, it may well be his most famous. But is this poem with its French title a mere piece of pseudo-medieval escapism, summoning […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of a series of odes the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote, and one of the most famous. Before we offer a brief summary of Keats’s poem, it might be helpful to read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ here in a […]
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was originally the name of an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem about a cruel woman, but the title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is more commonly associated with John Keats’s poem which tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was […]