Where the philosophes had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential Beauty.”78
