SOURCE: Introduction to Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. 1-9.

In the following essay, Alwes surveys Keats 's treatment of women in his poetry, asserting that the female is exploited "not only as an ideal to be achieved but as an obstacle to that achievement. " Alwes states that in Keats's poetry women symbolize the imagination and all it entails, from the joy of creation to the fear over its possible loss.

A reader of Keats's works cannot help being struck by the abundance of female figures. Every major poem involves at least one feminine character—often more than one—and almost always as the controlling metaphor. She serves alternately as a means of preservation and as an agent of destruction to the poetry's male heroes, the she who must be both embraced and denied in order to acquire...