The greatest poet of all time: the towering genius of John Keats!
art courtesy of the British Library Board
The greatest American poet,
and finest short story writer in history...
photos courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe Museum
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read more about John Keats
Edgar Allan Poe Museum
Keats had a beautiful way of wrapping poetical lines. He wrote with passion, using poetical tools like metaphor, simile, and assonance. He crafted it all within the confines of rhyme scheme and meter, usually 10 syllables per line. Combined free (unrhyming) and blank (unmetered) verse is a literary dead end, and time will show it as such...it is prose masquerading as poetry. T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound broke the pentameter, and free verse was born; in my opinion, it takes less talent to write free verse.
Poe had a command of the english language like few authors in history, a vocabulary that remains unequalled, and an imagination greater than 10 contemporaries. He wrote using long sentences, with commas, semi-colons and long dashes. His description was excellent. His poetry remains to this day a shining brilliance of literary genius-- and is still under-rated by many scholars. Annabel Lee is arguably the finest poem ever written by an American poet...it will live forever in literary history. The only victory over death is fame.
© 1997 mthomasr@internetmci.com
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