Poetic Inspiration and Philosophical Self-Discipline: Metapoetic Allusions in Keats’s Hyperion

Abstract

If Hyperion centers on the contrasting fates of Hyperion and Apollo—gods associated with music, poetic inspiration, truth and prophecy—the primary themes of power, loss, struggle, and suffering can be read metaphorically as metapoetic allusions to the succession of literary generations, articulating the nature of poetry and writing. When rewriting his unfinished Greek fragments into a first-person narrative in 1819, John Keats conducts a major reassessment of Moneta’s role in the project, the Roman equivalent of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses. He redefines Moneta’s relation to the poet-narrator, the poem’s main protagonist who is engaged in an increasingly self-conscious quest for knowledge of his true self and merits and who eventually undergoes a radical transformation into a superior Olympian god of music and poetry, replacing his Titanic predecessor. The goddess of memory and oral culture embodies an alternative discourse surprisingly decentered and polyvocal in nature. The conventional assumption that writing is a product of the solitary genius is obscured now by an interwoven fabric of discussion, feedback, narrative interventions, negotiations, and textual instability. In so doing, the second-generation English Romantic refutes the assumption that poetic power is a product of a heroic mind and philosophical solipsism rather than a result of a dialogic quest for knowledge.