Keats, following the lead of Hunt, used the free heroic couplet in several of the 1817 poems with a license even greater than Hunt's. In _Endymion_ he indulged in further vagaries of rhythm and metre that Hunt never dreamed of and in fact greatly disapproved of. Hunt said that "_Endymion_ had no versification."[207] In its want of couplet and line units, this is not very far from the truth. Writing of it again in 1828, he says: "The great fault of _Endymion_ next to its unpruned luxuriance, (or before it, rather, for it was not a fault on the right side,) was the wilfulness of its rhymes. The author had a just contempt for the monotonous termination of everyday couplets; he broke up his lines in order to distribute the rhyme properly; but going only upon the ground of his contempt, and not having settled with himself any principles of versification, the very exuberance of his ideas led him to make use of the first rhymes that offered; so that, by a new meeting of effects, the extreme was artificial, and much more obtrusive than the one under the old system. Dryden modestly thought, that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. Mr. Keats in the tyranny of his wealth, forced his rhymes to help him, whether they would or not; and they obeyed him, in the most singular manner, with equal promptitude and ungainliness."[208] _Endymion_ has been thought by some critics, to have been written under the metrical influence of Chamberlayne's _Pharronida_. In the number of run-on lines and couplets--a scheme nearer blank verse than the couplet--there is certainly a striking correspondence. Mr. Forman thinks that Keats knew the poem. Mr. Colvin and Mr. De Selincourt can see no real likeness. There is no proof as yet discovered that Keats ever heard of it.
In _Lamia_, after the extreme reaction in _Endymion_, Keats approached nearer to the classic form of the couplet used by Dryden, but still with greater freedom in structure than appears in either Dryden or Hunt. From the evidence of Brown it is probable that Keats imitated Dryden directly and not through the medium of Hunt's work, but it is very likely that Hunt directed him there in the first instance for a model. Mr. Palgrave says of the metre of _Lamia_ that Keats "admirably found and sustained the balance between a blank verse treatment of the 'Heroic' and the epigrammatic form carried to such perfection by Pope."[209] Leigh Hunt said that "the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty like sea nymphs luxuriating through the water."[210]