Chapter 6 opens with a discussion of some of the letters Keats sent his brother and sister-in-law after they migrated to America in the summer of 1818. It explores the paradox that letters can at times generate a sense of intimacy not so much in spite of distance but because of it. It looks at the way in which Keats can find people ‘pressing’ on him, and even oppressive, such that he can seem to value the prosthetic sense of presence offered by a letter and the personal space it can allow a different kind of intimacy. The second half of the chapter considers letters as ‘touching’, particularly in relation to Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, where he seems particularly attuned to the physical touch of a letter and the way that a letter can be emotionally ‘touching’ precisely because it is distanced, mediated, and delayed.

The introduction outlines the key themes of the book and offers brief summaries of individual chapters. It offers a brief overview of Keats’s letters and a summary of their publication history, their reception, and their place in his public reputation. The chapter proposes that Keats’s letters can be considered as a body of work in its own right, and that literary criticism needs to develop an epistolary poetics to enable and support a formal critical reading of his correspondence.

Chapter 4 explores the construction and performance of poetic selfhood in Keats’s letters – and argues that it is in part through letter-writing itself that John Keats becomes a poet. It is in and through letters as much as through the writing of poems that Keats invented for himself a poetic identity (a ‘poetical Character’, as he would call it). The chapter begins by examining Keats’s construction of a poetic self in a number of letters written between April and May 1817 to two mentor-friends, Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Robert Haydon. It then moves to an examination of a cluster of formative letters to and from Keats in the late summer and autumn of 1818, culminating in the presentation of his idea of the poet as ‘camelion’ – as responding to circumstances and changing environments, and ideally as having no ‘identity’ – in a famous letter of October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse.

Chapter 2 looks in detail at some of the ways in which Keats directly addresses the question of letter-writing. It proposes that a careful analysis of key letters can bring to light a Keatsian epistolary poetics. Keats is particularly alert both to the materiality and to the practical aspects of epistolarity, and his letters are characterized by frequent moments in which his interest in what letters are and how they work is foregrounded. He is specifically interested in how letters are constructed and in the tools and materials that form them, as well as more generally in the practical circumstances or contingencies by which they are determined and circumscribed. The chapter proposes that in their inventive and often playful explorations of epistolarity, Keats’s letters display an impulse to push against the generic and formal limits of the mode.

How does one let the infinite expanses of the heavens into the puny orb of a human eye? Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ envisions a form of filiation between sentient flesh and celestial light, a form of intimate and mutual recognition between the body and the spheres. This chapter confronts Barbauld’s poetic meditation to later poems by William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley which also endeavoured to force the infinite into the circle of the eye. As physiological optics laid bare the anatomical workings of sensation, the cultural representation of sight implied the irruption of darkness within light inside the obscure integuments of the eye. The central darkness at the heart of the human eye allows one to experience, through the configuration of one’s own flesh, the bottomless depths of the universe, while astronomy initiates a revolution in the perception of temporality.

This chapter explores the intersections of the aural and the tactile in Romantic poetry. To trace the emergence of form within organic and inorganic matter, Romantic poetry draws on the anatomical and musical concept of formant, a material structure that shapes sound into melody within musical instruments and within the organs of hearing and phonation. The anatomists who explored the inner ear discovered a form of internal landscape, with crags and crevices, akin to geological formations. This prompted Erasmus Darwin and William Wordsworth to meditate on the aural potentialities of inorganic matter: the mineral at the origins of sensation and the phonic richness of matter. Percy Shelley also attends to the vibrancy of matter aspiring towards form when he muses on sculpture: honing the stone but also the senses of the artist, sculpture orients the senses towards the invisible and the potential, awakening the aspiration for freedom.

As it traces the emergence of organic life and the gradual transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin’s treaty in verse The Temple of Nature develops a poetics of what eludes our sense of sight, of the viewless and eyeless beings at the radical origins of life. The chapter thus retraces a poetic journey back to a perceptual framework in which sight does not yet exist. Erasmus Darwin tries to apprehend life before the first eye opened, to envision a world so young that sensation itself had just been born. That journey also goes back to the origins of the alliance of poetry and science in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and its poetics of corpora caeca, those viewless bodies that create entire worlds through blind contact. It lastly registers some of the aesthetic and epistemic aftershocks of Lucretius’ and Darwin’s poetics of blind bodies in the poetry of William Blake.