Few of Keats's letters remain from the period before he joined his literary circle. From spring 1817, however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive skills as a letter writer. Keats and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other daily, and Keats's ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing news, parody and social commentary. They glitter with humour and critical intelligence. Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of awareness of his own nature and his weak spots. When his brother George went to America, Keats wrote to him in great detail, the body of letters becoming "the real diary" and self-revelation of Keats' life, as well as containing an exposition of his philosophy, and the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats' finest writing and thought. Gittings describes them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis.