 Although the poem was defended by a few critics , E. C. <unk> returned to the argument that the poem lacked a structure and emphasized the word " forlorn " as evidence of his view . In his 1957 work , <unk> did praise the poem as he declared , " The Ode to a Nightingale has a special interest in that most of us would probably regard it as the most richly representative of all Keats ’ s poems . Two reasons for this quality are immediately apparent : there is its <unk> evocation of that late spring and early summer season [ … ] and there is its exceptional degree of ' distillation ' , of concentrated recollection " . David Perkins felt the need to defend the use of the word " forlorn " and claimed that it described the feeling from the impossibility of not being able to live in the world of the imagination . When praising the poem in 1959 , Perkins claimed , " Although the " Ode to a Nightingale " ranges more widely than the " Ode on a Grecian Urn , " the poem can also be regarded as the exploration or testing out of a symbol , and , compared with the urn as a symbol , the nightingale would seem to have both limitations and advantages . " Walter Jackson Bate also made a similar defense of the word " forlorn " by claiming that the world described by describing the impossibility of reaching that land . When describing the poem compared to the rest of English poetry , Bate argued in 1963 , " Ode to a Nightingale " is among " the greatest lyrics in English " and the only one written with such speed : " We are free to doubt whether any poem in English of comparable length and quality has been composed so quickly . " In 1968 , Robert <unk> stated , " It may not be wrong to regard [ Ode on Indolence and Ode on Melancholy ] as Keats 's earlier essays in this [ ode ] form , and the great Nightingale and Grecian Urn as his more finished and later works . " 
