Chameleon Keats #2

I find Keats' description of the Chameleon Poet (sorry, I can't spell it his way) relatable in my own attempts at writing, so I guess I'll look into that.

My own philosophy is that "personalities" for real people are a fiction - the illusion, character, is formed by a combination of natural desires with social rules that a person attempts to self-impose based on their experiences and their current setting. Those rules bend depending on where a person is, who they are with, etc. Like Keats, I find myself mirroring people I am around, to a degree. Basically, I think the illusion of personality would be one of the easiest parts of making an Artificial Intelligence.

So when I write a character, I take a limited selection of rules and desires of my own or of others, and jack the levels up, which in its oversimplification creates the illusion of a "personality" that seems more realistic than if I tried to document every contradictory fragment of my own mixup of desires and rules. They're also more fun in extremes - as Keats points out, there's "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen."

How Keats seems to interpret this "no identity" experience is that I have been reflecting so many characters - every person I speak with or that I read through or dream through - that I lost track of my identity. This seems just as valid an interpretation as mine; in fact, maybe I like it better and will adopt it as my own from now on... : )

As to how Keats employed the feeling in his own work... it seems to work most clearly in the Lamia, where characters are continually shifting. The Lamia seems to have been a bodiless spirit, was cursed to become a snake (which sort of has that connotation of being treacherous...sorry, guys), then after her transformation into a woman shifts in character from nearly a goddess to a lover to a submissive wife - delighting in all her roles. When she is pinned down she is destroyed. Lycius also shifts from worshiper to lover to dominating husband, roles that he can't seem to reconcile with his former role as student. Apollonius never changes, but he shifts in the reader's eye from epic hero to epic spoilsport and murderer.
As far as the conception of the characters, the principle works as well because none of them seems to have a single motivation.

The only thing that seems strange to me is Keats' deeming the protean nature of a Poet "unpoetical," Why does the "Poetic" have to be unified? It seems there are often matters of high contrast that are poetic...