Through his prose and poetry, John Keats revealed much about his personal outlook and values that might be applied to a description of poets in general. Keats was fascinated by the workings of the human mind with its power to transform, connect, and communicate. He was full of curiosity, eager to relate the fragments of knowledge he acquired to his experience and imagination. At the center of his imagination was a core of key images associated with pivotal experiences from his childhood, and he relied on these images in all of his writing. He was keenly aware of the contradictions in life that exist simultaneously. Viewing himself as the embodiment of resistance, he was not content with things as they were. Rather, he resisted universal apathy, mediocrity, conformity, and institutional pressures, and sought the spiritual-a life beyond this life. As a poet, he chose to effect change within himself and thereby point the way for others; he was not interested in revolutionary, external change. (MAI)