The most over-the-top language of any great English poem: Ode to a Nightingale

The English Romance Poets of course were also known for their "visionary" poems, which were solace for a lot of "trippy" undergraduates back in the 1960s - who imagined that if they (we?) got high and jotted down some notes we were working in the tradition of Coleridge and Keats. Coleridge's Kubla Khan is probably the most famous of the vision poets, and especially notable because of its abrupt ending (and the legend that Coleridge wrote it in one sitting and was interrupted by a visit from a "man from Pawling" - wherever that is - the totally pedestrian nature of the visit, smashed against the divinely inspired act of nearly spontaneous composition is what makes the poem so emblematic of Romance poetry - a concept about poetic composition that lived right through the Beats, with Ginsburg's famous epithet, first though best thought). A greater visionary poem, however, is Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. It's a poem that really does take us on a journey along with the poem - or along with the poet's mind - from a depressed state, roused by the beauty of the call of the bird, following the bird's call in imagination across a vast landscape (both internal and external - the essence of Romance Poetry, the indelible link between the emotions of the poet and the conditions in the natural world - weather, topography, seasons, light/darkness). Probably no other great poem includes such over-the-top language. When Keats wants some wine it's: O, for a draught of vintage, that hath been cooled a long age in the deep=delved earth. Some of the truly astonishing passages include his description of the misery of human life that the bird "hast never known": The weariness, the fever the the fret, here where men sit and hear each other groan. And most striking of all - again, tied into Keats's romantic and tragic sense of his own mortality and imminent death: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain - one of the great lines in English poetry, right? Finally the sound of the bird fades - he feels forlorn, and the world "forlorn" "Like a bell" "tolls" him back into himself. In other words, he begins to become conscious of his language, rather than of his experience (and emotions) and becomes aware of himself and the poem ends - and he's not sure if he had a poetic vision or simply a dream. Do I wake or sleep?, is the famous last phrase.