"The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. Examine 'King Lear,' and you will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean _negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his admiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" was great, coupling that poem with Haydon's pictures, and with "Hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three things to rejoice at in this age." Soon afterwards, February 1818, while "Endymion" was passing through the press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:-- "In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it. And this leads me to another axiom--That, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.