The distinctive quality of Keats is sensationalism. What appears to us
as passionate expression, as sensitivity to the visual and the tactile,
or as a vein of sensuous melancholy, appeared to some of his
contemporaries as shockingly effusive, sensual, luxurious or auto-erotic.
Thus Byron-

"The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are:
why, he is the [Onanism] of Poetry . something like the pleasure an
Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street
Walker in Drury Lane. This went on for some weeks: at last the Girl
went to get a pint of Gin . met another, chatted too long, and Cornelli
was hanged outright before she returned. Such like is the trash they
praise, and such will be the end of the [outstretched] poesy of this
miserable Self-polluter of the human Mind" (Jack Ketch-proverbial
London hangman)

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