David Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In this essay, he examines the variations on human identity that John Keats explores in the sonnet "Bright Star!" and how death is the logical end.

In an October, 1818, letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, John Keats wrote, "A Poet is the most unpractical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse and 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 Creatures." In the poem, "Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art," we see the qualities...