Keats had to grapple with the realities of impermanence—the realities so often emphasized by Krishna in his long talks with Arjuna. Keats discovered early on that he could hold on to nothing. And so his koan—the central question of his life—became how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to have it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake. In order to become a great poet, Keats would have to work through the problem of grasping. The evidence that he finally did learn to live in the stream of impermanence is written—at his instruction—on his very
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