In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, aestheticians debated about whether the Divine Horticulturalist created a neat and geometrical or a wild and irregular Garden of Eden. The question was of crucial importance to them, because the nature of nature was regarded as the philosophical underpinning for the nature of everything that people should believe, feel and do. The nature of nature had ramifications as to whether people should live by intuition or by reason, whether artists should be rule-bound or spontaneous, whether art of all kinds should be rigid or free-form, whether the ideal human is a rationalist urbanite or a noble savage, whether society should be an orderly hierarchy or a diverse democracy, and whether standards of judgment should be objective or subjective.

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“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems very enigmatic at first. The more one dwells on it, the more it seems suffused with tragedy. The vision of the death-pale kings, princes and warriors is haunting to the imagination. The cry, “La belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall,” coming from their starv’d lips in the gloom, is a horrific cry of belated warning from the world of the dead victims. It is likewise haunting to the imagination. The more I read and re-read the poem, the more I got a sense that it had a very personal meaning for Keats, but a specific meaning still eluded me until I began reading his letters to Fanny Brawne. Then the whole, profoundly sad story became clear.

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