Bath Spa also said that works from Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley featured “violence, sexism, misogyny, death, mental illness, self-harm and suicide”.

Although not mentioned, it is possible the warning applied to Keats’ ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci, translated to The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.

The 1819 poem is about a beautiful fairy who tortures a besotted knight with endless visions of her after seducing him with her eyes and singing.

The poem reads: “And there she lullèd me asleep; and there I dreamed – ah! woe betide! – the latest dream I ever dreamt; on the cold hill side.

“I saw pale kings and princes too; pale warriors, death-pale were they all; they cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci; thee hath in thrall! 

“I saw their starved lips in the gloam; with horrid warning gapèd wide; and I awoke and found me here; on the cold hill’s side.”

Keats had likely composed the poem in an ode to Frances Brawne Lindon, his fiancee and muse. She would go on to survive him by 44 years after he died in 1821 from tuberculosis.

‘Poets found meaning for us all’

Jeremy Black, the emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, criticised the decision to impose warnings.

He told the Mail on Sunday: “These four poets are… key authors in the human aspiration to self-expression. Far from hating others, they found meaning for us all”.

Bath Spa University said the warnings “ensure a safe and inclusive environment” and that their use is considered on a case-by-case basis by tutors in the “context of their knowledge and understanding” of a particular group of students.