SOURCE: "Egotistical and Chameleon: Byron, Shelley, and Keats," Ch. 4 in The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Imagination, The Athlone Press, 1968, pp. 103-51.

In the following excerpt from her chapter, Ball argues that Keats 's poetry is marked by both egotism, in the poet's focus on his poetic vision as well as his own emotional needs, and by his chameleon-like response to his subject matter, that is, his ability to identify with and lose himself in the object of the poetry.

… Keats in his letters darts like a bird above the rough ground where his poems stumble and fight their way forward. The letters perceive in flashes, the poems must fulfil his precept—nothing is real until it is experienced. They are the means by which Apollo is made a god: experience becoming consciousness. The process is necessarily incomplete; its difficulty, never underestimated in his own...