READERS OF KEATS'S POETRY HAVE LONG SPOKEN OF THE ENCHANTING power of his language, though not all have found this quality commendable. Early critics complained of the "charm" or "force" of the rhymes in Keats's first published volume, Poems (1817), because it seemed to replace the verse's intellectual content. So Josiah Conder argues in his review of this first collection for the Eclectic Review in September 1817: Similarly, John Wilson Croker, writing in the Quarterly Review in September 1818, admits being "perplexed and puzzled" at Keats's diction and versification in Endymion because it "wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds ... composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn" (CH 112). Conder and Croker see Keats's verse as problematic not only because it oversaturates readers in sound and thus sets an allegedly poor standard for poetry, but also because it seems to have affected Keats himself in the same way (" [rhymes] have forced themselves upon the author").
