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John Keats visited his friend, Benjamin Bailey, at Oxford University in the early fall of 1817. On 22 November 1817, Keats wrote to Bailey: "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth" (Letters L184).1 The 22 November letter seems to be a continuation of a discussion between Bailey and Keats. In his letter, Keats argues that what imagination apprehends as beauty, and not, as Bailey apparently had argued, what reason apprehends, is truth.
A reading of the letters as edited by Rollins indicates that prior to writing to Bailey on 22 November 1817, Keats never in these letters used "beauty" and "truth" together in the same sentence or even together in the same letter. "Beauty" occurs twice before the letter of 22 November. Both instances are found in a poem in an August 1816 letter to Keats's brother George (tetters 1:106), and both instances refer to concrete images, not to beauty in the abstract. In the first instance, Keats uses "Beauty" in a common figure of speech to mean a woman: "the bright glance, from Beauty's Eyelids." In the second instance, beauty is an attribute of the moon: "when in the waviness / Of whitest Clouds, she doth her beauty dress."
Equally significant are the seven occurrences prior to the 22 November letter of the derived adjective "beautiful." Again, a reading of the letters edited by Rollins indicates that the first six occurrences are, as one would expect, adjectives modifying nouns: "beautiful things," "so beautiful a place," "you say how beautiful," "a beautiful Creature, as the Moon," "beautiful Tales," "beautiful Greece" (Utters, 1:127, 132, 150, 154). The seventh, however, occurring in a letter to Bailey on 3 November 1817, is a nominalization of the adjective: "O for a recourse somewhat human indépendant of the great Consolations of Religion and undepraved Sensations, of the Beautiful, the poetic in all things" (Letters, 1:179). Although Keats associates it with "Sensations" and "things," he nominalizes the adjective into an abstract concept: "the Beautiful."
A change also occurs with regard to "truth." A reading of the letters as edited by Rollins indicates that the word occurs three times in Keats's letters prior to his writing to Bailey on 22 November 1817. The first two occurrences are in idiomatic phrases...