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Keats, Milton, and The Fall of Hyperion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Stuart M. Sperry Jr.
Stuart M. Sperry Jr.*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , 1962 , pp. 77 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Notes

1 My indebtedness here and elsewhere in this essay to past critics of Keats will be obvious. I must, however, acknowledge my particular debt to the admirable studies of the two Hyperions contained in D. G. James's The Romantic Comedy (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948); Kenneth Muir's “The Meaning of ‘Hyperion’ ” (in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. K. Muir, Liverpool, 1958); and Douglas Bush's “Keats and His Ideas” (reprinted in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960).

2 John Livingston Lowes, “‘Hyperion’ and the ‘Purgatorio’,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1936, p. 35.

3 Muir, p. 111.

4 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 139. References by volume and page number to this edition are hereafter included in parentheses within the text.

5 See The Poems of John Keats, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 5th ed. (London, 1926), p. 519 f.

6 Keats abandoned both Hyperions, avowedly because of the Miltonic quality of their style, and in reaction against the artifice of Miltonic verse (see Letters, ii, 167, 212). But this was not until late September, and, as Bush and others have argued, his reasons went deeper.

7 De Selincourt, p. 520.

8 Throughout Keats's poetry wine is frequently associated with the power of the imagination, as in the second stanza of the Nightingale Ode.

9 Citations from Keats's poetry are to John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

10 The importance of the resemblance between the Garden of Eden and the garden in The Fall has been commented on by Brian Wicker, but in a way rather different from my own. For him the meal of fruits and the potion ‘‘constitute a substantial and sacramental union between the poet in his present disordered state and the state of primordial human innocence. They provide that substantial unity with the human race (through its general mother Eve) which Keats had yearned for, and they give meaning to the pledge by which he includes all the dead and the living in his own experience“ (”The Disputed Lines in The Fall of Hyperion,“ Essays in Criticism, vii, 1957, 39).

11 “Sleep and Poetry,” ll. 96-125.

12 Lowes traced many details in this section of the poem to the description of the Covenantal Ark and Tabernacle of the Lord in the Book of Exodus, which Keats had probably been reading (“Moneta's Temple,” PMLA, li, 1936, 1098-1113).

13 David Perkins has commented on this relationship in The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 281.

14 My italics except for proper names. Undoubtedly Keats also had in mind a part of the invocation to Book iii:

the mind through all her powers

Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

Purge and disperse, (iii.52-54)

a passage of which he took special note in his Milton (see The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. B. Forman, 4 vols., London, 1889, iii, 25-26).

15 James, pp. 149-150.

16 Cf. John Middleton Murry: “The fate of Saturn is a symbol of the destiny of the world, and Moneta is a symbol of the world made conscious of its own vicissitude” (Keats and Shakespeare, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925, p. 182).