Abstract

This essay considers Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ in terms of Cockney writers’ criticism of the post-war regime, exploring political, social, and personal implications of Apollo’s apotheosis. While Hazlitt’s characterisation of ‘legitimate’ governors illuminates the psychology of the Titans, Hunt’s ‘cosmopolitics’ reveal with prophetic overtones the democratic power of the press in the transmission of knowledge conducted by Mnemosyne. This, I argue, helps to position the new Olympian as the embodiment of the growing national importance of the printed medium after Waterloo. Viewed in this light, Mnemosyne’s tutelage reflects Keats’s own experience as a reader; the goddess’s foster child suffers, then, his idea of poetic heroism, shaped in part as a challenge to Hazlitt’s and Haydon’s skepticism of poetry’s reformative power.

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