ABSTRACT
John Keats's beautiful metaphor of life—that is, the life of the mind as a "mansion of many apartments", describes his personal state at the end of his poetic apprenticeship, in the foreshadow of his inspired poetry of 1819. It is a prototypal parable of the infant soul's explorations in the world of the mind. It includes Keats's conception of a "general and gregarious advance of intellect" in cultural history, in which new minds can take advantage of previous endeavours without having to rely totally on their "individual greatness of Mind" for every step forward in development. The initial intoxication of Maiden Thought conveys Keats's own first experience of poetry, which "swam into his ken" like a "new planet", and on which he seized with a "Leviathan" appetite for its emotional food. For Keats, "learning poetry" and "making the soul" was the same thing.
