A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats.  His friend, Cowden Clarke, read him the “Epithalamium” one day in 1812 in an arbour in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of “The Faery Queene” to take home with him.  “He romped through the scenes of the romance,” reports Mr. Clarke, “like a young horse turned into a spring meadow.”  There is something almost uncanny—­like the visits of a spirit—­about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary history.  It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp through “The Faery Queene.”  There even runs a story that a certain professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, “Oh, damn Spenser!” But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only as a starter for young poets.  Keats’ earliest known verses are an “Imitation of Spenser” in four stanzas.  His allusions to him are frequent, and his fugitive poems include a “Sonnet to Spenser” and a number of “Spenserian Stanzas.”  But his only really important experiment in the measure of “The Faery Queene” was “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  It was with fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy on Keats in “Adonais.”  Keats made a careful study of Spenser’s verse, the

  “Spenserian vowels that elope with ease”—­

and all the rest of it.  His own work in this kind is thought to resemble most closely the “Psyche” of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in 1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius.  It is inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of his pieces.  He also wrote an “Ode to Psyche,” which seems, however, to have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser’s “Polymetis.”  Mrs. Tighe was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser.  There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and over-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessential beauty of Keats.  She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word effects as abound in every stanza of “St. Agnes”: 

  “Unclasps her warmed jewels, one by one”: 

  “Buttressed from moonlight”: 

  “The music, yearning like a God in pain”: 

  “The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion.”

Keats’ intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development.  He admired the “Story of Rimini,” [31] and he adopted in his early verse epistles and in “Endymion” (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the couplet with enjambement, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface.  Many passages in “Rimini” and in Keats’ couplet poems anticipate, in their easy flow, the relaxed versification of “The Earthly Paradise.”