ABSTRACT
Keats is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the English canon. Keats’s popularity is partly attributable to the fact that he seems to symbolise the archetypal poet. The myth of Keats replaced the historical biography, precisely because there were no detailed facts available to disprove it. The discussion of Milnes’s book has shown the problem of relying upon Keats’s letters in order to reach the ‘indisputable truth’ of Keats. Keats’s declared aspiration, to divest himself of identity, was bound up with his belief that a poet should have no didactic purpose in his poetry, no obvious moral investment. Keats’s ‘negative capability’, the emptying out of distinct and personal features in his character, seems to have had an impact upon his behaviour and his poetics, as described in his letters and poems. Keats’s self-consciousness extended to his thinking about his own death, which of course overshadowed the last year of his life.
