Commentary on the sources of Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci has been almost as extensive as though, instead of being one of the few successful literary ballads in English, it had been a Child Ballad. If modern scholars are right, the poem is a veritable quintessence of Keats's reading. Despite its directness, intensity of feeling, and powerful simplicity of appearance, we are told that its genesis or genre includes medieval literature -Alain Chartier or his Chaucerian translator, Dante's Inferno, Palmerin of England; folk ballads-Kemp Owyne, Thomas Rymer, Tam Lin; renaissance literature-Spenser's Faerie Queene, Robert Burton, William Browne of Tavistock, Shakespeare's Pericles, Milton's When the Assault was Intended for the City ; the pre-romantics Chatterton, Wieland's Oberon, Cowper's Anti-Thelyphthora; the older generation of romantics-Wordsworth's Peter Bell, Tintern Abbey and Her eyes were wild, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Love, and Ancient Mariner; and Keats's contemporaries-Reynolds's Peter Bell, the Amena hoaxing letters sent to Tom Keats, Hunt's Story of Rimini, Mary Tighe's Psyche, F. M. Dovaston's Elfin Bride, and John Polidori's The Vampyre. Since Keats, like most serious and growing poets, borrows also from himself, we must also reckon with associations from Bright Star, The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of St. Mark, Paolo and Francesca, Endymion, the Lines (to Fanny?) beginning What can I do to drive away, the Song of Four Fairies, To My Brother George, and Ah! ken ye what I met the day.' Of all these authors