ught" that was the prevailing mode among intellectuals at the time (Ward, "Persistence" 16). This had important implications for his poetry, which is almost completely unconcerned with the state of humanity in political or social terms. Keats' idealism, rather than treating the external world, centered on "the world of the senses, and the degree to which experience may or may not empathize or give itself over to what is outside itself, and with what consequences" (Ward, "Persistence" 16). Keats did not lay out the terms of his understanding of the nature of poetry in systematic descriptions of his art or criticism of the art of others. The principal discussion of the art of poetry derives from the letters where he developed ideas rather spontaneously--or, at least, gave them expression in a very immediate manner. One such discussion, in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, addressed the important question of a poet's emphasis on personal expression. In this 1819 letter he remarked on Wordsworth's tendency toward making such expression paramount in his poetry and noted that the works of the poet, whom he admired deeply, might be said to possess a quality that he called "the egotistical sublime" (quoted in Stone 13). He wished to avoid this particular approach and believed that self-expression of his experience and beliefs should be, if it was a feature of his poetry at all, accomplished indirectly. The works themselves, rather than aspects of his personal feelings or life, should be the principal matter considered by the reader and the critic. Shakespeare, he continued, "led a life of allegory: his works are the comment on it" (quoted in Stone 13). This formulation of the relationship between the poet and his works was typical of Keats' approach to the discussion of the art of poetry. It was, as Stone notes, "an illuminating idea which is not the product of a chain of reasoning; it is rather the shaped effusion of a min...