This chapter talks about the myth of solitary genius. The myth is fuelled by the Romantics’ merciless crossfire, some of which tended to bolster the impression of solitary grandeur. On 27 October 1818, for instance, Keats sought to distance himself from ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone’. Ever since, Wordsworth has been branded a solipsist, a charge that does scant justice to him and even less to Keats, who was arguing that William Wordsworth ‘was guilty of forcing himself upon both the material and the reader, and of allowing the self to obtrude upon the impersonality of great poetry’. Keats may have recalled Hazlitt who, in his Lectures on the English Poets, hailed Wordsworth as a genius who ‘sees nothing but himself and the universe.