pher 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."

Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817: "Nothing startles me beyond the
moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow
come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the
gravel."

For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt,
by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the
beginning of 1818 he was, according to his own account, quite unable to
appreciate Raphael's Cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into
them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is
interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier
Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan
(so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). "I do
not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance
and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I
ever saw, not excepting Raphael's, but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet
still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished
works, as there was left so much room for imagination."