Chapter 8 looks at a critical moment in Keats’s life in order to trace the way, in his letters, he works through a crucial decision about his future as a writer. Focusing on a series of interlinked and in some ways ‘porous’ letters written during a single week in September 1819, the chapter discusses Keats’s sense that he is, or soon will be, ‘unpoeted’ – that he can no longer be a poet. Alone in the small city of Winchester, Keats writes a series of often overlapping letters that ultimately move him towards a decision concerning whether or not to end his career as a poet. The chapter aligns the specific circumstances of the limited space of the cathedral city in which Keats is temporarily staying with the limited space of the letter-page itself and examines how he resolves a critical life choice in and through correspondence.