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The Meaning of Hyperion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is generally agreed that had either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision been completed, the result would have been a lofty utterance of Keats' best wisdom in fundamental matters. As to what these matters and this wisdom comprised there has been wide difference of opinion, particularly in respect to Hyperion.* In The Fall the poet, speaking in his own person, gives us some pretty clear hints; in Hyperion we must guess the meaning from the nature of the story and the characters. Hyperion, the longer of the two, is usually held to be the better poem; it is certainly the more cryptic. It has been variously explained as signifying: “the unity of all existence”; “a self-destructive progress toward good … that beauty and not force is the law of this change … light and song passing into union and perfection out of elemental crudeness”; as “the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into oblivion by new creators of form and order”; as “the epic of the Revolutionary Idea”; and as the apotheosis of “disciplined imagination” and “a state in mental stature where all facts, pleasant or otherwise, will appear in their proper perspective.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936
References
* [Article lxxi was accepted some months before Article lxxii.—Ed.]
1 F. M. Owen, John Keats, A Study (London, 1880), p. 104.
2 Robt. Bridges, Collected Essays, (Oxford, 1929), iv, 115.
3 Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays: Fourth Series (1907), p. 124.
4 H. W. Garrod, Keats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 69.
5 C. D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats, (New York, 1926), p. 140.
6 J. M. Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), pp. 79 ff.
7 Amy Lowell, John Keats (Boston and New York, 1925), ii, 339–346.
8 DeSelincourt, Poems, p. 487.
9 Letter 35, p. 88. References to the letters are all to two-volume edition of M. Buxton Forman, Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press (1931).
10 E. DeSelincourt, Hyperion, A Facsimile of Keats Autograph Manuscript, Oxford, The Clarendon Press (1905).
11 Poems, ed. DeSelincourt, p. 514.
12 Amy Lowell, John Keats, ii, 226.
13 Letter 22, p. 53. Reference to “a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer,” and the appearance of Oceanus in Endymion III written about the same time.
14 Letter 93, p. 274.
15 Letter 93, p. 280.
16 Letter 114, p. 322.
17 Woodhouse's statement that “it contains 2 books & $frac12 (about 900 lines in all)” proves that the poem he had seen by April 1819 was Hyperion, not The Fall; since the latter contains only one and one half books, 506 lines. Cf. Lowell, John Keats, ii, 342.
18 Letter 133, p. 399.
19 Letter 142, p. 419.
20 Letters 82, p. 236, 83, p. 238, and 89, p. 245. Cf. Lowell ii, 340.
21 Letter 114, p. 352.
22 The letter to Bailey, a borrowing, according to Miss Darbishire, from a magazine article published in July, 1819, (Helen Darbishire, “Keats and Egypt,” R of ES, iii, No. 9 [Jan., 1927], 1–11). The letter to Reynolds and Woodhouse “abandoning” the revision, a letter to Fanny Brawne, July 25, referring to a “very abstract poem” (Letter 130, p. 392), and finally, Brown's statement that he was recasting Hyperion in the form of a vision in Dec., 1819.
23 Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry: His Friends Critics and After-Fame (New York, 1917), p. 427.
24 Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, p. 85.
25 W. P. Ker, “Note on Hyperion,” The John Keats Memorial Volume (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1921), p. 113.
26 Leigh Hunt: Review of Lamia, The Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, etc. in The Indicator for 2 & 9 Aug., 1820.
27 Buxton-Forman, Works, ii, 177.
28 J. Hoops, Keats' Hyperion (Heidelberg, 1898), p. 30.
29 A. W. Crawford, The Genius of Keats (London, 1932), pp. 163–164.
30 12th ed. (London, 1823).
31 Letter 22, p. 53.
32 Cf. also the reference to “the feud 'twixt Nothing and Creation,” vv. 40–41.
33 Sidney Colvin, John Keats, p. 194.
34 Particularly in Canto i, vv. 161–202.
35 Vv. 513–562.
36 Letter 24, p. 59.
37 Letter 72, p. 193.
38 Letter 114, p. 339.
39 Italics mine.
40 Letter 29, pp. 72–73.
41 Letter 35, p. 88.
42 Letter 82, p. 236.
43 Letter 88, pp. 245–246.
44 Did Keats omit a not here?
45 Letter 93, p. 274.
46 Letters 57, p. 142; and 59, p. 146.
47 Letter 75, p. 208.
48 Letter 172, p. 507.
49 Letters 71, p. 187 and 114, p. 363.
50 Letter 14, p. 31.
51 Vv. 307–309.
52 Letter 136, p. 407.
53 Book i, vv. 42–44.
54 Book i, vv. 108–110.
55 Book i, vv. 192–194.
56 Book i, vv. 206–208.
57 Book i, vv. 235–243.
58 Book i, vv. 327–336.
59 Book ii, vv. 27–28.
60 Book ii, vv. 93–98.
61 The Mind of John Keats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926), p. 141.
62 Book ii, vv. 334–340.
63 Book iii, vv. 10–28.
64 Thorpe, op. cit., and G. R. Elliot, “The Real Tragedy of Keats—A Post Centenary View,” PMLA, xxxvi (1921), 315–331.—John Hawley Roberts, in his article, “Poetry of Sensation or of Thought?” PMLA xlv (1930), 1129 ff., expresses the view that Hyperion reflects this conflict, and concludes, also, that Keats' real reason for stopping it was “that he did not honestly believe the idea he was expressing.” But Roberts accepts Garrod's interpretation of Apollo as symbolizing “the humanitarian” in contrast with “the visionary” and takes the meaning of the poem to be “that the poetry of philosophic humanitarianism is better than the poetry of sensation.” This interpretation seems to depend upon a few lines near the end of the poem:
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me,
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,
(etc. to … hollows of my brain)
The body of the poem, with its careful contrast between the Titan's nature and Apollo's is not taken into account. Moreover, the view requires a rather special reading even of these few lines.
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings
must be read as signifying solely poetry of thought. Keats' list would hardly appear as exclusive as this. “Grey legends,” for example, would include such poems as The Eve of St. Agnes, and La Belle Dame, and these are specifically cited by Roberts as poems “full of sensuous appeal” and “not humanitarian poems.” The power which makes a God of Apollo is the power of Poetry, not of a special and limited kind of poetry. The conflict reflected in the poem is not so much between two types of poetry (though perhaps this is implied) as between two types of being, and the resolution of the conflict is to an effect quite opposite from what Roberts and others have held it to be. Cf. also his article “The Significance of Lamia,” PMLA, l (1935), 550 ff.
65 The Fall of Hyperion, i, vv. 175–176.
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