Leigh Hunt shrewdly opined that ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was the best poem Keats wrote, and modern criticism is just beginning uneasily to wonder if he may not have been right... And of course Keats turned against the poem, as he habitually did when he had done something marvelous...

He could not see how the incongruous factors in ‘St Agnes Eve’ nonetheless worked together to make it the kind of masterpiece adored by the Victorians. Porphyro, ‘brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ in true ‘Mother Radcliffe’ style (yet who but Keats would have seen a helmet plume as brushing the cobwebs?), is a figure of complex human and poetic origins, a voyeur and would-be seducer who is also a rapt adoring lover longing to make Madeline his bride. Troilus, Iachimo and Romeo are present in him, but he is also very much his Keatsian self, like one of the ‘carvèd angels, ever eager-eyed’.