You see his genius
rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes. Not to
multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818
to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament,
differentiating it from what he calls the "Wordsworthian Character--the
egotistically sublime." He goes on to say that he feels that he has no
identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which
external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone
again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other
people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently.
He adds in a fine elation that "the faint conceptions that he has of
poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead."
Such a letter as this admits one to the very penetralia of the
supremely artistic mind--but the wonder of Keats' confession is that he
saw himself as clearly and distinctly as he saw everyone else. And
further, I do not think that there is anything in literature that gives
one a sharper feeling of the reality of genius than to find the
immortal poems, such as _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, copied down in the
middle of a letter, as an unconsidered trifle which may amuse his
correspondent.
Now, in saying this, I do not for a moment say that Keats was an
entirely admirable or even a wholly lovable character--though his
tenderness, his consideration, his affectionateness constantly emerge.
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