Keats's letters must be among the most intellectually exciting of any writer. Leaping haphazardly from one idea to another while examining the processes of his own mind, he suddenly alights upon a dazzling peak of perception. In the letter to George and Tom Keats of December 1817, for example, he starts with Edmund Kean's performance as Richard III. What at first appears to be a random recollection, provides the key to the central preoccupation of the letter. From Kean's acting he moves to identify the limitations of a painting by Benjamin West, and stumbles with barely a punctuation mark, into one of his greatest aphorisms. In the painting, he says:
there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth – Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout.
Keats responds feelingly to Shakespeare's plays. “The women one feels mad to kiss,” shows us why Keats is such a reliable critic of Shakespeare, and why King Lear, a play whose key line is “I see it feelingly,” (4.6.143) remains for him the epitome of an art which transforms cruelty and suffering in the white heat of beauty and truth. Keats does not write about Shakespeare, he feels him.
Feeling is also the criterion by which he judges the fashionable London set whose company (in this letter) he has just left, full of “singularity,” cleverness, and all with identical “mannerism[s]”: “these men,” he writes, “say things which make one start, without making one feel.” These “wits” have just disparaged Edmund Kean's “low company,” so Keats returns from them saying how much rather he would be in Kean's “low company” than theirs, and then:
Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime.