Fantasies Fleeting in the Murk of Modernity: John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?

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‘Who art thou that disputest with God’: The Satanic Pursuit of Purpose in ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’

If there was an era in which it could be argued that the mind of the modern man was born, it would be the Enlightenment period. As Pagden writes, the era ‘[stood] for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own end for themselves rather than let others do it for them’,[1] and as philosophers like Voltaire denounced monoliths like Christianity as a ‘long-standing infection’ whose […]

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