The 'egotistical sublime' is a phrase coined by John Keats to describe the poetry of William Wordsworth in an 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse.
The phrase expresses the underlying self-centered nature of Wordsworth's poetry, particularly his use of the narrative voice to convey his own conception of a singular truth.
The egotistical sublime contrasts with Keat's perception of 'negative capability' which he believed to be the ideal and exemplified by the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
[1][2] English literary scholar, John Jones, titled his 1954 work on William Wordsworth The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth's Imagination.
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