His life consists in fuzy, fuzzy, fuzziest.  He drinks glasses, five for the quarter, and twelve for the hour; he is a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns:  he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him.  He calls himself ‘a curious old bitch’, but he is a flat old dog.  I should like to employ Caliph Vathek to kick him.  Oh, the flummery of a birthplace!  Cant! cant! cant!  It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache.  Many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest—­this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity:  the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet.  My dear Reynolds, I cannot write about scenery and visitings.  Fancy is indeed less than a present palpable reality, but it is greater than remembrance.  You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos.  You would rather read Homer afterwards than remember yourself.  One song of Burns’s is of more worth to you than all I could think for a whole year in his native country.  His misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one’s quill; I tried to forget it—­to drink toddy without any care—­to write a merry sonnet—­it won’t do—­he talked, he drank with blackguards; he was miserable.  We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man, his whole life, as if we were God’s spies....

TO RICHARD WOODHOUSE

The poetic character

Hampstead, 27 Oct. 1818.

MY DEAR WOODHOUSE,

Your letter gave me great satisfaction, more on account of its friendliness than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable in the genus irritabile.  The best answer I can give you is in a clerklike manner to make some observations on two principal points which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con about genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition, et coetera. 1st.  As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—­it has no self—­it is everything and nothing—­it has no character—­it enjoys light and shade—­it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—­it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.  What shocks the virtuous philosopher 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