The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after the abusive reviews had appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats's want of decision of character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates; whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt whether in Keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he thought of the poetic phase of mind and working. "As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member--that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing _per se_, and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self. It is everything, and nothing--it has no character. It enjoys light, and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have _no_ nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children."