Fall Of Hyperion Research Articles

Shelley and Keats Revisited: The 1820 Volumes

ABSTRACT Shelley and Keats published their most important poetry collections in the summer of 1820, Keats’s Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, both with ‘other poems’ which became famous staples of Victorian anthologies. The 1820 volumes include the poets’ anguished self-portraits, defining Romanticism for later readers. The poems also should be read as the poets’ continuing dialogue about the nature and function of art. For Keats, great art is a ‘balm and comfort’ to suffering humanity, uniting beauty and truth, implicitly telling later generations: ‘that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.’ Shelley, in contrast, is a prophet of revolution. Driven by his ‘passion for reforming the world’, he sees art as an intercessor between the oppressed and their society, urging by precept and example that human beings have the power to change their lives. The dialogue goes back to the earliest works of the poets, and remains unresolved in their last unfinished works, Shelley’s Triumph of Life and Keats’s Fall of Hyperion. For us, the dialogue, still unresolved, remains of supreme interest.

From Cloudy Trophies to Quiet Power: Keats’s Hyperions, the 1819 Odes, and Michael O’Neill’s Late Poetry

This essay reads Keats’s 1819 poetry alongside Michael O’Neill’s poems about his terminal illness. It focuses on Keats’s abandonment of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion in favour of ‘To Autumn’ through a juxtaposed reading of ‘cloudy trophies’ and ‘quiet power’. The Hyperion poems explore the collapse of the Poetical Character in the face of incurable, immortal suffering. While the spring odes, exemplified in a reading of ‘Ode on Melancholy’, attempt to balance the dynamic between a speaker and its poetic subject through apostrophe, the conclusions of the odes are self-cancelling. ‘To Autumn’ signals a breakthrough from curative to palliative poetics through the simultaneous celebration of life insisting on itself and the process of dying. The contrast between Guy’s Hospital and the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester underlines the shift in vision from incurable suffering to palliative, quiet power.

‘Patient Travail’: Keats and Samson Agonistes

Scholarship on Keats’s fascination with Milton has tended to focus on his response to Paradise Lost. This article sheds new light on Keats’s engagement with Milton by exploring the significance of his reading of Samson Agonistes with Charles Armitage Brown during their walking tour of North England and Scotland in the summer of 1818. I suggest that Milton’s rendering of human suffering in Samson Agonistes answered Keats’s previous doubts about Milton’s ability to ‘think into the human heart’, enabling him to revise his ideas about epic and further conceptualise the work of the poet as an act of healing. In Samson Agonistes Keats found a model of poetry that puts pain, patient suffering, and limited vision at its core. These ideas became central to Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, the epic fragments which bookend Keats’s ‘living year’ between the autumns of 1818 and 1819.

“Where beats the human heart”: Jean-Nicolas Corvisart's Treatise on Diseases of the Heart and John Keats's Hyperion Poems

ABSTRACT In 1806, the renowned French medical expert Jean-Nicolas Corvisart published a treatise that represented over twenty years of work on percussion and auscultation, specialized diagnostic methods that allowed him to interact directly with patients’ bodies to diagnose illnesses of the thorax. Translated into English in 1813 as A Treatise on the Diseases and Organic Lesions of the Heart and Great Vessels, Corvisart's book quickly found its way onto the shelves of the medical library at London's Guy's Hospital, where John Keats famously spent eighteen months studying during the years 1815 through 1817. In this essay, I argue that Keats not only likely knew of Corvisart's treatise but also integrated a conception of Corvisartian diagnostic methodology into the fabric of his poetry and thought and especially in his later writings, including Hyperion: A Fragment (1820) and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (comp. 1819). As I show, Corvisartian techniques and methodologies as well as Keats's detailed training in anatomy and physiology help us to understand better not only the fall of the Titan Hyperion and his replacement by Apollo, the Olympian poet-healer in Hyperion, but also Keats's abandonment of both characters for the dreamer poet-physician of The Fall of Hyperion.

ABOUT THE EPIC SUBJECT: HEROES, HEROINES AND ANACHRONISM

Considerations about a special subject, the epic, or, in other words, the hero and/or the heroine who are the protagonists of some long poems which talk about history and myth in a literary way, with or without traces of anachronism. We will consider the evolution of concepts of subject as a fundamental category for literary studies, the evolution of the epic genre itself, the epic representation of women and the anachronism as a possible presence in epic poems. Illustrating our reflection we will comment some epic poems which integrate the epic expression in English: The faerie queene, by Edmund Spenser; Paradise regained, by John Milton; The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope; The Fall of Hyperion, by Keats; Christ, by Gavin Bantock; and South America. Mi hija, by Sharon Doubiago.

Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge by Karen Swann

Reviewed by: Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge by Karen Swann Tadakazu Suzuki (bio) Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge Karen Swann Fordham University Press, 2019, 192 pp. ISBN 9780823284177, $30.00 paperback. In calling her book Lives of the Dead Poets, Karen Swann is making obvious reference to Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81), with which she hopes to evoke a sense of “the hagiographic, cultic” attachment to the figures of the poet (1). The twist she gives to Johnson’s title—together with the cover image chosen for the book—signals an interest in the afterlives of her subjects, and the book opens with the claim that “this book explores the insistence of biography in the reception [End Page 849] histories of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge” (1). However, the five main chapters of the book do not really explore the roles biography performed in the processes of the poets’ posthumous receptions. Instead, these chapters mainly engage in examining the allegorical “figures” of the enervated, other-worldly poet that are brought into relief by close readings of the selected writings of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge, and quotations from biographical accounts written by their contemporaries. Certainly, these chapters develop into the book’s introduction, which helps us to think through our fascination with these poets’ prematurely truncated lives in a constructive way, rather than simply condemning it as naïve and sentimental. Yet, as Swann clearly states, her “primary engagements are with contemporaries who work in British (and in some cases European) romantic studies and who remain caught up, however tendentiously, with the legacy of deconstruction, especially the work of Paul de Man” (26). To some readers, especially those outside the circle of “professional romanticists” on whose work Swann builds her arguments, the discussions after the introduction might seem at times arduous (11). However, Swann’s interesting case studies will be rewarding in their own ways to any reader who perseveres and familiarizes themselves with her prose. The book’s title evokes, for a Keats lover, the state of the “posthumous life”: an untimely suspension of life in an insulated space “that open[s] between the death sentence . . . and the moment of his actual death” (31). The represented “figure,” which is in this equivocal state, functions as a Benjaminian allegory of “the Poet” in the age of commodity capitalism. Swann focuses on this poet-figure, which we encounter as a character in a poem or as an image of a particular poet constructed by themselves and their contemporaries. Chapter 1 explores the accounts of Keats in his “posthumous life” and the figures of arrested, beautiful youths in Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion. Chapter 2 looks at Shelley’s controversial elegy Adonais and finds in it the narrative of melancholic fixation dramatized as Urania’s longing for Adonais whose death she fails to encounter. Chapter 3 takes up what Swann calls the “pod people” in Shelley’s poems—“hermetic figures” appearing in Canto 10 of The Revolt of Islam or the “glamorous Witch” of The Witch of Atlas—that resonate with the image of the elusive and ephemeral Shelley the Poet (76, 83), and speculates on their radical political potential in their disengagement from our social and political concerns. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with late Coleridge who, “after the heady period of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, or alternatively, after the crash of 1802 that led to his convalescence trip to Malta in 1803” (99) frittered away his intellect in ways that were “not productive in ordinary terms” (92). Chapter 4 is a kind of performative “abstruse research” that teases out the figure of Coleridge engaging in his research—his “work without hope”—that is “unrenderable into any common language and unsuited to any common use” (95–96). Here, she gives concentrated readings of Coleridge’s two notebook poems and “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” informed by André Green’s psychoanalytical study of “the work of the negative” (100). This “long detour” prepares the reader to encounter “Coleridge the Talker” [End Page 850] in Chapter 5 (114). Making a good use of biographical materials, many of which are taken from...

Conceptualizing Artificial Intelligence through Alternate Neo-Planetary Models in the Science Fiction of Dan Simmons.

The technological competence of a nation is confirmed by the number of successful space expeditions. Science Fiction from the early 1900s has dealt with the idea of living in conceptual spaces. This paper deals with select works of Dan Simmons including four prize-winning Science Fiction novels which are usually referred to as the Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1989), Endymion (1996), The Rise of Endymion (1989). In modern Techno-Fiction, the mind of the man and the scientific innovation of the machine have been harmoniously brought into existence as Cyborgs through Artificial Intelligence. The life expectancy and the available technical manifestations would seem scarce to get into a feasible interface of enhanced human beings and mechanical efficiency to accelerate the voyage into an anticipated future. This study further examines the ways in which the incredible complexity of the Cybernetic self has been portrayed in the works of Simmons. The principle aim of this proposed paper is to understand the context of the technological forces unbridled in the man-machine interface and how it has been constitutive of bringing up a new social order. It further analyses how symbolic, social spaces can be experienced adversely by multiple Man-Machine synthesis - mutant beings and clones during the planetary invasions. It is unnatural of a Cyborg to think politically or materialistically, as the functioning would be predominantly based on the commands received from its Artificial Intelligence led consciousness. Moreover, Cybernetics would be an exploration into the formidable secrets, the realm of decrypting ciphers and interpreting codes and cryptograms. Furthermore, embracing the possibilities without a foresight into the Man-Machine synthesis, might lead the whole humanity into a catastrophe depicted by Simmons.

Роман Дена Сіммонса "Гіперіон" у контексті інтертекстуальних зв’язків з творчістю Джона Кітса

The article analyses the specificity of intertextual connections of novel “Hyperion” and its continuation “The Fall of Hyperion” by Dan Simmons with the works of the English romantic poet John Keats, namely narrative poems The Fall of Lamia and poem Ode to the Greek Vase. The topicality of the work done is due to the lack of systematic review of the intertextual references presented in novel Hyperion, as well as to the great popularity of Dan Simmons in Ukraine and abroad. The features of the postmodern version of the myth by Simmons are considered as the result of the polylogue between the modern vision of the Hyperion’s image, the ancient cycle Titanomachy and the European romantic tradition, in which the perception and artistic reflection of the history about Hyperion are represented by the literary works by J. Kits. The process of transforming romantic images inside the problematic dimension of the novel using direct quotation, allusions and reminiscences is analysed. These allusions are studied as the ones creating the problem core of the novel, with respect to modern threats and issues, such as development of AI. Epigraphs of Simmons’s “Hyperion”, which refer to the personal correspondence of J. Keats, are defined as the key to understanding the subtext and connotations of the novel. Literary legacy by Keats is seen as the source of evolutionary views, shared by Simmons, as well as the background helping the modern author refer to the downfall of the general cultural level and reduction of the importance of classic literature.

キーツとサンクチュアリ : 1817年詩集から「ハイペリオンの没落」まで

キーツとサンクチュアリ : 1817年詩集から「ハイペリオンの没落」まで

Romantic Quotation in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

This essay argues that many of the problems that arise in interpreting quotation marks in two poems by John Keats – namely, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream – are primarily grounded in later editors’ responses to variances in earlier documents. The interpretive moves that can or cannot be made often depend upon punctuation that was invented by persons other than the poet when sources turned out to be at odds, or when documentary evidence proved non-uniform. The variable presence of quotation marks in some, but not other, versions of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the sudden disappearance of quotation marks from a passage in which the reader has been led to expect them in The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream provide striking examples of the interpretability of quotation marks in Keats’s work, as well as in Romantic poetry more generally.

Sage, humanist, and physician to all men: Keats and Romantic Conceptualisations of the Poet

In the aftermath of the French Revolution which failed to give birth to a hoped-for new egalitarian age in Britain, radically-minded poets were forced to confront the question of what their role was in a post-Revolutionary age. This article examines Keats's distinctive contribution to the debates of his day by exploring his crafting of the figure of the poet in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. What do Keats's sympathetic portraits of the fallen Titans and the unrealised perfection of Apollo have to tell us about his conceptions of the poet? I begin by looking back to influential models of the epic poet by Dante, Milton, and Macpherson which Keats and his contemporaries inherited, before examining the extraordinary debate with Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion in which the poet-narrator defends the poet as ‘a sage, / A humanist, physician to all men’, only to destabilise his own claim to the title.

Unspacing: The Architecture of Poetry in Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion

Focusing on Alastor and The Fall of Hyperion , this article explores how catastrophic changes such as globalization are imprinted on poetry as a hidden figure, altering the very “space of literature” in the Romantic period. In contrast to William Wordsworth’s Prelude , which keeps city and country separate, nature in Alastor is traversed by ruined cities, disorienting the poem’s internal architecture, and making it difficult to bring the poem into focus generically or emotionally. In Sigmund Freud’s terms, some radical event has bypassed consciousness and gone inside, rendering consciousness superficial and the unconscious inaccessible. John Keats’s poem more consciously thematizes its own architecture to unground the existing conceptuality of poetry, initiating a more modern poetry that points forward to Gerard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire.

Visions in Verse: Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions

Visions in Verse:Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions Anita O’Connell (bio) In Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology the criterion for distinguishing dreams from reality is rational communication (Schlutz 113). Quoting Heraclitus’s dictum, “when we are awake we have a world in common, but when we are asleep each has his own world,” Kant argues that the faculty of fantasy blurs this distinction (Kant, Anthropology 63; see Schlutz 113). Inspiration and original genius are the “involuntary and hence dream-like products of fantasy” (Schlutz 115, see Kant 50–51). Inspired poetry and art sit uneasily, for Kant, between sleep and waking as they rise up out of the world of dreams to communicate their visions within the waking world. For Romantic poets, it follows that art and poetry could also act as an essential bridge between the two worlds, as a means of communicating the dreams and visions of the creative mind with the outside world. They were a representation for the outside world of what lies inside that otherwise exclusive state of the dreaming mind. Some of the best-known Romantic dream visions, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, as discussed here, attempt to take up this challenge and seek to communicate the inspired visions that lie at the heart of the original creative idea. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats embraces this role for the poet, claiming “poesy alone can tell her dreams” (8). However, like many Romantic dream visions that reflect on their own creation, the poem is keenly aware of one crucial problem inherent in this process: language. Before the twentieth century, ideas, thoughts, and inspired moments were all thought to be visual, not linguistic. To take creative ideas from the imaginative mind and communicate them with the world through poetry involved a transformation from the visual to the linguistic, from visions into verse. In the Romantic period the creative vision in the mind could refer to the inner experience of any of a range of imaginative states, from thoughts and ideas to the vision that is imagined when reading, composing poetry, daydreaming, in reverie, madness, or sleeping dreams. This is what Alan Richardson refers to in “Reimagining the Romantic Imagination,” borrowing neuroscience’s current terminology, as “the default mode.” [End Page 35] For Richardson, memory, prospective “future thinking,” daydreaming, nocturnal dreaming, and theory of mind or mind reading are linked in Romantic brain science as what scientists might now call defaulting, but which was understood in the Romantic period as various ways of imagining (389). When Romantic poets explore these states of mind, they understand them as a spectrum of liminal imaginative states. Shelley and Coleridge both argue that the imaginative states in this spectrum differ only in degree, not in kind.1 In Speculations on Metaphysics, Shelley claims that: Thoughts, or ideas, or notions … differ from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been supposed that those distinct thoughts … which are called real … are totally different in kind from those … such as hallucinations, dreams and the ideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of these ideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation of the nature of things. (59–60) Shelley here claims a similar cognitive process for dreams and hallucinations as for thoughts or ideas, varying only in the degree to which the waking reason has control over the imaginative state. Though they differ in degree or force, they are similar in kind because in each the mind imagines a mental image. A vision in the mind was at the heart of all of these states because the imagination was, in essence, the image-making faculty. From the time of Aristotle one of the primary roles of the imagination was to create and store images within the mind. As Alexander Schlutz explains in Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, for Aristotle the role of the “phantasia” (which would later become the imagination) was to allow a mediation between aesthesis (sense-perception) and dianoia (discursive thought). As the ability to...

Reading Keats to the Letter: e

For Karl Kroeber Sweet sweet is the greeting of (1) having two little loopholes, whence I may look out into the stage of the world (2) IN AN ESSAY CHASTISING TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRITICAL EFFORTS TO RECUPERATE Keats as a silenced radical, Paul Fry has remarked: Nor can the author of 'If thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave' ... be saved for feminism.' (3) Fry does not stick his neck out to say so; he does not even need to quote the still more notorious line with which the offending passage (from the Ode on Melancholy) continues: Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, Feed deep, deep upon her eyes. (18-20) This passage has often been lamented as a lapse or false note in an otherwise magnificent poem) But in the context of Keats's oeuvre it is more like a motif. Comparable passages featuring a masculine gaze upon peerless feminine can be found in Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Fall of Hyperion, and Lamia. (5) For many, this spells sexism, to which Keats pleads guilty in a passage adduced by Fry: The sale of my book [writes Keats to Charles Brown, referring to the poems of 1820, which include the Ode on Melancholy] is very slow.... One of the causes, I understand ... is the offense the ladies take at me.... I am certain I have said nothing to displease any woman I would care to please: but still there is a to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats,--they never see themselves dominant. The tendency confessed here would appear to reference the Ode on Melancholy directly, where peonies, the morning rose, and thy mistress's are all catalogued together. I am not primarily interested in exonerating Keats from charges of sexism, least of all where (being Keats) he criticizes himself. (7) But I am interested in pursuing a formal observation about the passage cited by Fry that I believe will show judgments like his to be premature. If the content of that passage has given many readers pause, the form of line 20 seems calculated to do so. And feed deep, deep upon her between its monosyllables, its monotone, its early caesura, and its awkward joining of words with consonants on both ends, hitting the first half of line 20 after lines 18-19 is like tripping down stairs into a bed of pea-gravel. if the halted traveler should pause to look about, he may notice another extraordinary feature of line 20: a certain exuberance in e's. More than a third of the letters are e, and half of the syllables depend on a double e. Only at the line's end, however, do these e's appear as what they are, as eyes: the word eyes both announces them verbally and presents them pictorially, as in a face. Fanciful as this might seem, the iconic use of e's as is a cliche in ads for eyeglasses and security systems today (figs. 1-8). Keats's letters demonstrate his own playful awareness of the resemblance. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] [FIGURE 5 OMITTED] [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] [FIGURE 7 OMITTED] [FIGURE 8 OMITTED] [FIGURE 9 OMITTED] Keats wrote in September 1819 to John Hamilton Reynolds, whose sisters were in Devonshire: Your sisters by this time must have got the Devonshire ees--short ees--you know 'era--they are the prettiest ees in the Language. O how I admire the middle siz'd delicate Devonshire girls of about 15. (8) This passage refers mainly to the acquisition of a local accent, but by writing e as ee, which is an occasional Scots and archaic English form for eye, and by shifting the register, with the next sentence, to the visual, Keats makes the whimsical suggestion that Reynolds's sisters must be developing pretty along with their accented e's. …

The Ethics of Negative Capability

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes “The burthen of the mystery” (line 38) in “Tintern Abbey.” Ou's Introduction includes a comprehensive overview of almost 200 years of scholarship on negative capability. In the Keatsian creative paradigm, the connection between empathy, healing, and poetry is not unlike what we see in the Biblical Christ who feels the pain of others, effects magical cures, and tells stories to enlighten as well as soothe. In fact, Christ could be seen as the penultimate shaman-poet. As Keats's poetry matures, he becomes increasingly Christ-like, suffering from not only his own illness but also from the exquisite sensibility he cultivated to become a successful poet. (See discussion of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion in this essay.)

The Implications of Immortal Grief in Shelley's ADONAIS and Keats's THE FALL OF HYPERION

Critics have thoroughly canvassed Percy Shelley's Adonais, an elegy on the death of John Keats, in search of allusion. One heretofore neglected passage, however, links the two poets further and can...

‘What Edward promises he will perform’: ‘How to do things with words’ in Sense and Sensibility

A recent denigrating essay on Jane Austen1 rehearses charges more or less forgotten in her recent recrudescence as an ironic icon of ‘popular culture’. The tally of points against suggests that if ...

Keats's Way of Salvation

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.--Leon Bloy (1) KEATS WAS AN INVETERATE SEARCHER AFTER TRUTH RATHER THAN ONE who ever felt he had firm grasp of it. As he wrote to Benjamin Bailey, have not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations. (2) He lived, if any poet ever did, in Negative Capability--in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason (Letters 1: 193). For all this, though, he never stopped searching; just weeks after his remark to Bailey he wrote to his publisher: find I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge (Letters I: 271). As Dennis Haskell writes, like all poets he was implicitly concerned with questions of Unlike most poets he was also often explicitly concerned with the question of truth. (3) It is curious, then, that the critical view of Keats that has reigned virtually unchallenged through much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1940s, sees him as kind of modern skeptic, fully in tune with the values of post-Christian era. The work of Hoxie Neale Fairchild and Edward Bostetter may be cited as symptomatic, and Ronald Sharp's important study, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty, articulates the case fully and impressively. (4) It was not until the publication of Robert Ryan's Keats: The Religious Sense in 1976 that this orthodoxy came to be seriously questioned. (5) Since then, however, there has been relatively little study of issues in Keats. As Robert Prescott wrote in splendidly wide-ranging review of this question, because Ryan's work is so thorough, critics have made little more of the nature of Keats's more private thought. (6) When Ryan published Keats: The Religious Sense, over twenty-five years ago, my review in the Keats-Shelley Journal noted that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that it hadn't been written before. And yet it was perhaps only after it was written that one realized how much it had been needed. We do not, after all, commonly think of Keats as religious poet. And yet Ryan's book made convincing case that religion and speculation played far greater role in Keats's life, and in the forming of his imagination, than we had allowed ourselves to believe. Keats: The Religious Sense is not study of Keats's poetry. Ryan chose rather to focus on his life--and especially his letters--as means of determining the shape and evolution of Keats's personal creed. Because he finds the elements of Keats's poetry to be in large measure untraditional, Ryan suggests that it is helpful first to come to some understanding of Keats's basic theological point of view outside the poetry. He offers his study, therefore, as a sort of prolegomenon or preface to any further examination of the aspects of Keats's verse, as well as to the study of his most important pronouncements on the nature of poetry (6). The purpose of this essay is to apply Ryan's reading of Keats's life to the poet's great letter of spring 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats--notably the vale of soul-making passage--and to the poems most intimately linked with it: the Ode to Psyche and The Fall of Hyperion. In approaching dimensions of Keats's poetry, I suggest that middle path may be taken between, on the one hand, thoroughgoing skeptical and secularizing view and, on the other, view that would baptize Keats into something approaching Christian orthodoxy. As Prescott justly observes, we must pay serious attention to the deep ambivalence evident in Keats's (22), and sedulously avoid the error of militantly secularist critics in their imposition of subtle exclusion principle: the idea that since the poems and letters voice in places skeptical secularism, that the content of the same letters should therefore be ignored or devalued (23). …

Keats, professional medicine, and the two Hyperions.

As a licensed apothecary and a "Cockney" poet, John Keats was doubly aware of his marginalized status as a member of the professional class. In his poems "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion," Keats examines the relationship between the professions of medicine and poetry writing, attempting to determine the ideal "healer" of the ills of humankind. In the process of writing and reworking these poems, Keats found--in the figure of the apothecary--a way of validating, even embracing his position as the "Cockney poet." Keats's experiences as a "lower" type of medical worker enables him to revise the figuration of the poet, from an all-powerful, world-healing Apollo in "Hyperion" to an "apprentice" poet-speaker in "The Fall," a character whose visit to Moneta's vale teaches him to serve humanity in less wide-sweeping but more material ways.

The Cambridge companion to Keats

Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Texts and abbreviations Glossary A biographical note Chronology People and publications Where did Keats say that? 1. The politics of Keats's early poetry John Kandl 2. Endymion's beautiful dreamers Karen Swan 3. Keats and the 'Cockney school' Duncan Wu 4. Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes Jeffrey N. Cox 5. Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion and Keats's epic ambitions Vincent Newey 6. Keats and the ode Paul D. Sheats 7. Late lyrics Susan J. Wolfson 8. Keats's letters John Barnard 9. Keats and language Garrett Stewart 10. Keats's sources, Keats's allusions Christopher Ricks 11. Keats and 'ekphrasis' Theresa M. Kelley 12. Keats and English poetry Greg Kucich 13. Byron reads Keats William C. Keach 14. Keats and the complexities of gender Anne K. Mellor 15. Keats and Romantic science Alan Richardson 16. The 'story' of Keats Jack Stillinger 17. Bibliography and further reading Susan J. Wolfson Index.