The Selected Letters of John Keats pierce the myth that is the poet Keats. This myth is immortalized in Shelley's great lament "Adonais:" His fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto eternity! This myth whose language 20th-century poet Wilfred Owen said he would fight and die to preserve (he did both). The myth that eternally knotted truth and beauty: What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.

John Keats's (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) letters to his family and friends, written when he was twenty-one until his death at twenty-five, show a man struggling wrestling with self-doubt yet saw himself, hoped for himself, poetic immortality. In 1817, after Keats decides to forgo a career as a surgeon and become a poet, he writes:   Keats' parents were both dead when he made this decision. His father died when Keats was eight, and his mother died from the family illness, tuberculous, when Keats was fourteen. Although being a surgeon in the 19th century was not what it is today (surgeons were not entitled "Doctor" but rather "Mister," a habit that still exists), still I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Keats would have reacted to their son's financially impractical devotion.     
      
When American poet Mark Strand decided to become a poet full-time, his mother said, "But then you'll never be able to earn a living." Strand reminded her of the soul-feeding pleasures of poetry.

I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of maturer years—in the interval, I will assay to reach as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer.

Of course, Keats would inherit tuberculosis and die soon after. He was confined to a sickbed for much of the last two years of his life. Although sickness must have been on his mind, death was more mythical. His doctors often told him he was fit as anything, and the illness was "in his mind."

Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in 1819:

I have been in so irritable a state of health these two or three last days that I did not think I should be able to write this week. Not that I was so ill, but so much so as only to be capable of an unhealthy teasing letter.

Keats sees himself in an "ill state" but not a sick state. Keats was always accompanied by others regardless of his condition, disproving the notion that creatives need solitude.   The connective link between creativity and solitude is well-evidenced. It's often stated clearly and emphatically from the likes of poets Rainer Maria Rilke and American poet Wendell Berry. And painters like van Gogh. Even Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius advised we go into ourselves to find answers. To "go into solitude" is almost a mythical place, our arrival at which summons genius. I prefer Marilynne Robinson's view that there is a grand community in isolation—that we are connected with those who also appear unconnected.  
     
I adore solitude. But as far as creating goes, the right emotional mindset, a supportive space and a routine and habit mean just as much. (Read more on these aspects from dancer Twyla Tharp or creative-writing teacher Dorothea Brande, who both wrote genius could be taught).  
     
Like most issues of the human psyche and heart, it is delightfully complex. As these Selected Letters attest, Keats surrounded himself with friends, mentors, family, and individuals who bolstered his self-esteem and creativity and looked after him in sickness.

Yesterday I went into town for the first time for these three weeks—I met people from all parts and of all sets—Mr Towers—one of the Holts—Mr Domine Williams—Mr Woodhouse—Mrs Hazlitt and son—Mrs Webb—Mrs Septimus Brown...

 Charles Brown's pencil portrait of his close friend John Keats, 1819.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said he wrote letters to friends to ease and enable his writing hand. John Steinbeck wrote to his friend and publisher daily while writing his last great novel, East of Eden.

Keats published his first collection, Poems, in 2018, which was poorly received. Letter-writing was a nurturing space for Keats to create without judgment.   It might be difficult to imagine Keats as anything but a genius, but in his time and even for a while after his death, he wasn't well received. The early Georgian writers and Romantic poets were the first powerful poetic force after Shakespeare and were thus compared to the Bard. This cultural propensity of posthumous recognition persists. So many are those who were never acknowledged until after death—like Keats' fellow Romantic poet John Clare suffered this fate.

John Keats' letter to his brother Tom was written on July 10-18, 1818. Tom died from tuberculous in December of the same year; Keats had been with him but took a walking holiday in July to reacquaint himself with nature. Learn more.

The brightest point and harshest pain are in Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne, a woman he loved all-consumingly but was unable to marry due to his illness.

My dearest Girl,

At this moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul, I can think of nothing else...My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you—I am forgetful of everything, but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further.

Interestingly, the letter to Fanny Keats mentions a future that does not exist. Of course, he owes it to be without her, "life seems to stop there"; one wonders if it is Keats' incipient recognition of mortality.

Design for a memorial to Keats, "Fates Seizing Keats," by Joseph Severn, 1822. © Harvard University

In his last known letter, dated in late 1820, two months before he died, Keats discusses his inevitable death in the only way he (or any human) could: an awareness without understanding.

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having passed and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.

Like his mother before him, Keats died young from tuberculous. He died in the care and arms of Joseph Severn. Thanks to Harvard University, a significant collection of his selected letters is available online.   Thanks in particular the Amy Lowell Fund, named for and founded by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, cousin of Robert Lowell and primary biographer of Keats. I think Keats would have been pleased, being "among the poets" thus.