John Keats, a true son of the English Romantic Movement, was an idealist to whom concepts such as Truth, Beauty and Imagination were both real and important. Since he believed that such insights had to be 'proved upon the pulses', he set out to explore and test the meaning of this for himself—a process that we can trace in his poems and letters. His writings are accompanied by an awareness that his time as a writer might be short, lending intensity and poignancy to his poetry; his letters reveal an engaging personality, full of humour and enjoyment of life.