Criticism of Keats' Melancholy After reading the title of John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” I was immediately intrigued. I thought it odd to base a poem on the feeling of melancholy. The poem touched me and after I completed reading it, I felt depressed and sad. I feel that it was Keats’s choice and arrangement of words and lines that helped to draw me in and, thus, feel the particular emotion that the poem is all about, melancholy. I can easily understand why many authors chose to critique and write about Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.” Two articles in particular are Keats’s Ode on Melancholy by Theodore L. Gaillar