Fall Of Hyperion Research Articles

The Endgame of Taste: Keats, Sartre, Beckett

In deciding what kind of weather suits his taste, Beckett’s absurdist quest-hero Molloy decides that he has no taste, that he had lost it long ago.1 Modernism never wholly let go of the aesthetic legacy of taste, and by 1947 when Beckett was working on the first novel in his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, it had already experienced this legacy in the form of an existentialist nausea. Perhaps nowhere do we see this more clearly than in Keats’s late fragmentary epics, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, where the metaphor of taste gives way to an all-pervasive sickness in the stomach. While the starving speaker of The Fall of Hyperion fails to relish the stale banquet he is offered at the outset of the poem, the defeated gods of Hyperion suffer an existential queasiness playing itself out in bodies that are “crampt and screw’d.”2 Hyperion experiences a “nauseous feel” from the repulsive smells he is forced to consume. Critics since Walter Jackson Bate have noticed the proleptically existential tone of the Hyperion poems: they “anticipate much that we associate with existentialism (no other major nineteenth-century poem does this to the same extent).”3 Here I pursue the possibility, evinced by Keats, that existentialism itself— and its dominant paradigms of nausea and disgust—constitutes the philosophical aftermath of aesthetic taste.

The Male Romantic Poet as Gothic Subject: Keats's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

A previously overlooked Gothic subtext in John Keats's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, his 1818 and 1819 fragmentary works on poetic election, calls his epic project of Bildung into question. Whether it is Saturn, Apollo, or himself that the narrator witnesses, his returns to scenes where an effeminized male body is subjected to pain and domination become a way to explore questions of legitimation and empowerment when those can no longer be presupposed by the writing subject. While recent readings of these poems have tended to align their fragmentation with Keats's refusal of mastery, this essay claims that Keats identifies male masochism and effeminacy as a perverse condition of, rather than an impediment to, the attainment of symbolic power. Apollo's eroticized submission in Hyperion and the poet's self-castigating rituals in The Fall of Hyperion (as well as his return to the Titans) stage the very experience that they supposedly stand in the way of-legitimation. Not only does bodily dispossession directly measure symbolic possession, but also, through his doubles, Keats recognizes himself in this negative loss of power.

The Male Romantic Poet as Gothic Subject: Keats's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

The Male Romantic Poet as Gothic Subject: Keats's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream

Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in "The Fall of Hyperion"

ACCORDING TO RECENT DISCUSSIONS, KEATS'S HYPERION FRAGMENTS draw on a historiography of style that opens with the ancient sublimities of Egypt and moves on to the lucent beauties of Greece and Rome. This argument is based largely on descriptions of the Titans which allude to Egyptian sculpture, thus recasting the war with the classical Gods as an international event pitting the west against a prototypical Orient.(1) The identification of the Titans with Egypt is also grounded in Keats's biography; Egyptian sculptures were displayed in the British Museum next to the Elgin Marbles, where the poet viewed and was impressed by both.(2) However, the Titans' spectacular temples and palaces are not exclusively or even primarily Egyptian. Rather, they participate in the Regency's architectural exoticism, which included Egyptian and Greek designs but drew on a broader range of eastern styles among which Indian sources were prominent.(3) Like the Egyptian, the Indian stood for antiquity and sublimity, for the commercial and imperial domination of the East by Europe, and for a generic thrill related to but separable from these other effects.(4) Because of British involvement in the subcontinent, the Indian also foregrounded, more clearly than did domestically neutral Egyptian elements, the exotic style's potent but ambiguous status in the culture at large.(5) Indian designs were pervasive and controversial, and if the discourse surrounding them tended in one way or another to construct India as Other, it remained unclear whether this Other was properly an object of rigorous intellectual inquiry or a source of lucrative cheap thrills.(6) Meditating on how best to please his audience, Keats had concluded that they want is ... sensation, and his descriptions of eastern architecture are significant not because they express a vision of history but because of their sensationalism, which poses itself against the anti-pictorial, anti-commercial orthodoxy of the Regency's critical establishment.(7) The question of description is suggestive for an inquiry into the social elements of literary and taste because it bears on the fundamental between image and word. This difference, which criticism has often emphasized in order to favor the latter over the former, has recently faced a turn in theory. W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, refuses to absorb poetry and painting into a single semiotic but argues that there is no essential difference between them, and Christopher Collins, surveying research in psychology, concludes that mental imaging closely resembles the seeing of the eye, although their physiological and phenomenological differences are also important.(8) That is, we don't have to pretend to confuse poems with paintings in order to acknowledge that visual conceptions can be transmitted through the agency of language and that the pleasures of pictorial are genuinely visual.(9) The exclusively linguistic mind is thus a discriminating mind in an entirely social sense. The elite reader, whose interpretive strategies emphasize what is most difficult to do but also what can be naturalized over time, favors the culturally and semiotically allusive over the vulgarly, simply referential.(10) Complex codes of linguistic signification are more difficult to internalize than the Skills required by most pictorial strategies, which depend upon a combination of immediate, consensual understanding (a noun stands for a common, if potentially complicated, object) and detail-by-detail reconstruction of significant people, places, or things.(11) Conversely, when pleasure is generated by written language, not painting or sculpture, it offers to destabilize critical orders based in linguistic authority. As Collins argues, such orders maintain their own credibility by asseverating the truth of their written messages, but the power of words to produce images is an all-too-vivid reminder of their power to lie. …

Hyperion, "The Fall of Hyperion", and Keats's Poetics

Hyperion, "The Fall of Hyperion", and Keats's Poetics

The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats and Baudelaire

Abbreviations Introduction 1. Burke's sublime object as object of idealogy 2. History in the background of Wordsworth's 'Blind Beggar' 3. The letter and the spirit of the law: Wordsworth's restagings of the French Revolution in The Prelude 4. Manifestations of the body politic: Keats's Hyperion 5. From the war in heaven to engagement on earth: repetition in a different tone in The Fall of Hyperion 6. Baudelaire's theory of practice: ideology and difference in 'Les yeux des pauvres' 7. Theorizing commoditites/the commodification of theory: Baudelaire's 'Assommons le pauvres!' Between Proudhon and Marx Notes Index.

Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry

From the mortal maidens of 1817 to the omnipotent goddesses of 1819, Keats uses successive female characters as symbols portraying the salvation and destruction, the passion and fear that the imagination elicits. Karla Alwes traces the change in these female figuresmultidimensional and mysteriously proteanand shows that they do more than comprise a symbol of the female as a romantic lover. They are the gauge of Keats s search for identity. As Keats s poetry changes with experience, from celebration to denial of the earth, the females change from meek to threatening to a final maternal and conciliatory figure.Keats consistently maintained a strict dichotomy between the flesh-and-blood women he referred to in his letters and the created females of his poetry, in the same way that he rigorously sought to abandon the real for the ideal in his poetry. In her study of Keats s poetry, Alwes dramatizes the poet s struggle to come to terms with his two consummate idealswomen and poetry. She demonstrates how his female characters, serving as lovers, guides, and nemeses to the male heroes of the poems, embody not only the hope but also the disappointment that the poet discovers as he strives to reconcile feminine and masculine creativity. Alwes also shows how the myths of Apollo, which Keats integrated into his poetry as early as February 1815, point up his contradictory need for, yet fear of, the feminine. She argues that Keats s attempt to overcome this fear, impossible to do by concentrating solely on Apollo as a metaphor for the imagination, resulted in his eventual use of maternal goddesses as poetic symbols.The goddess Moneta in "The Fall of Hyperion" reclaims the power of the maternal earth to represent the final stage in the development of the female. In combining the wisdom of the Apollonian realm with the compassion of the feminine earth, Moneta is more powerful than Apollo and able to show the poet who does not recognize both realms that he is only a "dreamer," one who "venoms all his days, / Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve."Because of Moneta s admonishment, Keats becomes the poet capable of creating "To Autumn." In this final ode, Keats taps the transcendent power inherent in the temporal beauty of the earth. His imagination, once attempting to leave the earth, now goes beyond the Apollonian ideal into the realm of salvationthe human heartthat connects him to the earth. And because of his poetic reconciliation between heaven and earth, Keats is ultimately able to portray an earthly timelessness in which "summer has o er-brimmed" the bees "clammy cells," making for "warm days [that] will never cease.""

Keats and Hellenism: An Essay

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the text Introduction 1. Fictions old and new 2. Towards Endymion 3. Flowers of speech 4. The fall of Hyperion 5. Silent forms 6. Lamia or, antiquity decomposed Notes Select bibliography Index.

Moneta and Ceres: The Final Relationship Between Keats and the Imagination

Research Article| September 01 1988 Moneta and Ceres: The Final Relationship Between Keats and the Imagination Karla Alwes Karla Alwes Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (1988) 43 (2): 195–219. https://doi.org/10.2307/3045174 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karla Alwes; Moneta and Ceres: The Final Relationship Between Keats and the Imagination. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 September 1988; 43 (2): 195–219. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3045174 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1988 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience (review)

Reviews197 TAe Poetry ofKeats: Language and Experience, by David Pollard; xiv & 172 pp. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1984, $28.50. It is not advisable when puffing a new book to disparage work of recognized excellence. But that is what the publishers of The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience do in the blurb on the dustjacket when they complain most unjustly of the treatment that Keats has for long received from his critics. Perhaps they take their cue from David Pollard, who in this book altogether ignores the important work of Walter Jackson Bate, Walter H. Evert, Stuart M. Sperry, and other modern scholars, and who, as if no one had studied Keats seriously since Middleton Murry, develops in his own undisciplined fashion an approach derived, according to him, from Heidegger's work on German poetry. Dr. Pollard says that the aim of his essays is to allow Keats's poetry to speak (p. x), but he does not do this so much as obscure the poems with his paradoxes (such as the statement that the poet in The Fall ofHyperion "is in the safety of insecurity" [p. HO]), with his dark sayings (such as this on the Odes: "The is of the saying legend is bequeathed to the poet in silence by holding itself in reserve" [p. 78]), and with his mistakes. Perhaps one can overlook his calling Pan "Bacchus" (p. 27), but his occasional misreadings invalidate some of his arguments. He supposes that the attack on Augustanism in "Sleep and Poetry" refers to Keats's contemporaries (p. 10), and thai: the criticism in the same poem of the themes of much contemporary poetry is an objection to themes in general. He states, "Poetry is never the communication of a theme" (p. 11). He twice quotes the third and fourth lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as follows: "canst thus express/ . . . more sweetly than our rhyme" (pp. 44, 46). Omitting the object, "A flowery tale," he discusses the meaning of express as if it was an intransitive verb, so as to reach the conclusion that it is "the urn that speaks, that ex-presses from out of the silent hiatus in the sea of language" (p. 50). He confuses quotations from the same ode, saying that it is the "silent form" (and not "human passion") "That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd" (p. 71). He identifies the savage mentioned at the beginning of The Fall ofHyperion with the humanitarians, "Who feel the giant agony of the world" (pp. 109, 112). For the most part his book is a development of a theory of negative capability , which he understands in a broad sense that includes silence, indolence, and a poet's lack of identity. To these ideas of Keats's he adds a theory of language, according to which it is the very nature of language "not to express itself in words, but to withhold itself (p. 54). Such strange statements are combined with tireless repetition of his favorite quotations from Keats. Wellknown passages in the letters, such as "Adam's dream" and the "Chamber of Maiden-Thought," recur frequently, as do quotations from the "Ode on a Grecian Um," the "Ode on Indolence," and the "Epistle to Reynolds," as Pol- 198Philosophy and Literature lard endeavors to convey his notion of Keats's creativity, which is best summed up in these words: "The renunciation of Self in the moodlessness of indolence is at one and the same time the renunciation of language and in this renunciation the poet is granted the poem" (p. 91). He then argues that when, after completing the Spring Odes, Keats wrote for money in the summer of 1819, he departed from this principle of renunciation and approached the egotistic purposefulness of Milton rather than the self-annihilation of Shakespeare. This application of Hazlitt's distinction to Keats's practice is interesting and clearly expressed. What weakens it is the fact that, whereas Pollard mentions the work which Keats did during that summer, he takes no notice of the poet's most obviously Miltonic effort, the first version of Hyperion, which was composed towards the end of the previous year. University of Canterbury, New...

The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (review)

Book Reviews Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. 291 pp. $26.95. Two methodological traps await anyone who studies medicine in the work of a writing doctor. Donald Goellnicht falls into both, but clambers out before this book is through. The first might be called conclusion by cumulation, wherein a biographer or critic says, in effect, "Here is a previously missed instance of medical knowledge in my subject's work, here is another, and another: are they not all remarkably interesting?" Goellnicht's excavations of such instances nearly come to a halt under the weight of his own thoroughness. Nor can he entirely avoid the second trap, which is conclusion by association. This method leads to vague and largely unverifiable claims that solely because of a writer's medical ties his or her work is notable for some quality—perhaps compassion or objectivity—which the critic associates with medicine. Thus, in this book Keats becomes a more "muscular " poet than people have generally allowed. Almost inevitably, he also becomes the poet he idealizes in Apollo of "The Fall of Hyperion "—"a sage; / a humanist, physician to all men." One wants to believe that. Many readers will believe it because in the end Goellnicht goes beyond the limits of this type of study through the simple device of adopting as a theme the influence of Keats's medical training on his developing thought over time. In one move Goellnicht links his cumulations and associations to consequences. He must first establish the biographical bases, which is no easy task amidst the dearth of reliable records relating directly to Keats. Goellnicht's narrative is clouded with "may," "perhaps," and "almost certainly." Everyone knows that Keats apprenticed himself from ages fifteen to twenty to a respected apothecary-surgeon and subsequently spent several months as a pupil and dresser (a sort of chief resident) at Guy's Hospital, London. But no one is certain about why he entered 162 BOOK REVIEWS medical training or why he left it shortly after his twenty-first birthday to live as a poet. Goellnicht wants to show that, contrary to certain long-accepted accounts, Keats had a valid attraction to a medical career, was a good student at Guy's, and left not because he abhorred medicine —let alone science or rational processes generally—but because he loved poetry. When he left, Keats carried a good deal of medicine with him, apparently even more than he realized at first. Along with his textbooks , he took certain perspectives and skills, which soon appeared in images and metaphors and later combined with his suffering as poet and patient to produce genuinely mature ideas. In order to establish just what medicine may have meant to Keats, Goellnicht has rooted out rare syllabi and textbooks from the era. He is thereby able to assess what each of four courses of study contributed to the poetry and letters. Classes in chemistry, botany, anatomy and physiology, and pathology and medicine gave the young writer dozens of specific references, most of which will be incompletely understood by the reader who is not armed with the insights of Stuart Sperry on chemistry and the creative process, Charles Hagelman—whose unpublished dissertation is the only other reliable full-length study of Keats and medicine—and, of course, Goellnicht himself. The author is convinced that Keats's astonishingly acute skills of observation were trained through his medical studies, that he was essentially of an empirical bent (philosophy, Keats said, must be proved upon the pulses), and that he is most triumphantly the doctor-poet when he exercises his empathie memory of human misery. In the finest section of the book, "Pathology and Medicine," Goellnicht demonstrates how Keats practiced what amounts to aesthetic healing. The terminally ill young man had first to heal his mind before he could reach out to suffering humanity through the altruistic poetry that constitutes the merger of his medical and literary selves. Stylistically, this book has the faults of its original dissertation format, and its virtues too. There is never any question, for instance, about the source for a fact or interpretation, never any doubt...

On a Villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop

THE NEW YORKER M A G A ZIN E published a masterpiece on April 26, 1976. Elizabeth Bishop's Art, later reproduced in her Geography HI, is a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabness may do for an all-too-golden repetitive form. It is superior to the maudlin manias of Thomas, finer than the cerebrations of Empson and still severe, and takes its place along with those of Auden, James Schuyler, and a few other premonitory practitioners' specimen stanzas. The title is Art, and it identifies for us the integrity and lack of integrity that remain the polarizing tensions of the poem. It is indeed a poem of explicit art, of many-minded cunningness. The poem reminds us, as Freud does in his chapters upon the theme of forgetting in The Psycho pathology of Everyday Life, that the most buried life corresponds in its dynamic aspects to writing, to expression. The poem is necessarily self referential and self-reflexive whilst it never gives up its bitter burden of referentiality. The art of losing seems a mere theme, but it is also the central and active theme of themelessness, affording such a space of absence to the poem. The title is reserved and masterful. In a poem which conceives of mastery in the most negatively thrilling terms, it stands as a Keatsian lone star of hermitage over the poem. The title is an unadorned handle and forgets nothing. A villanelle may be said to be the classic form of repetition and persistence. Like Kierkegaard, Bishop broods about the possible repetitions possible upon this mortal earth. She is part of the dreaming tribe Keats brooded about and nearly deposes in his Fall of Hyperion and she persists in brooding. The poem is both an homage to poetry, a defense of poetry, and a terrifying lament about the weaknesses of poetry in relation to mortalia that touch us in the Virgilian sense. Each repetition furnishes a new twist of suffering. Rather than producing a stream of repetitions to remind us of voice or consciousness in Stein's explicit meanderings, she composes and decomposes with repetition and persistence to give us a very palpable thickness (in Jakobson's senses) of attention. The poem is filled with palpable dissonances of off-rhymes that link Bishop with the tradition of orality, desire, and dissonance, in Dickinson and Moore: fluster/master; gesture/master. These dissonances each lead to the incongruous congruent rhyme of master and disaster. It IS disaster that is the large fate of the master. As Heidegger has it of Nietzsche, so Bishop of herself, the topoi are the circle and suffering. The poem is a circle from which we cannot escape anymore than Borges can escape from Odin's disk in his phantasmal story. The poem and its archaistic form are themselves a fine and almost comical fate. One modulates from dissonance to dissonance, as in Charles Rosen's sense of the classical style, too often perceived as a

Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion

A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.

Imagination as the Theme of The Prelude

IM A G IN A T IO N AS THE THEM E OF THE PRELUDE ROSS WOODMAN University of Western Ontario Imagination having been our theme," writes Wordsworth in the concluding book of The Prelude,1 So also hath that intellectual Love, For they are each in each, and cannot stand Dividually. (xiv, 206-9). The "intellectual Love" to which he here addresses himself is, in context, presented as the pinnacle of a graduated scale. At its base is the purely instinc­ tual love that exists (in Wordsworth's example) between the lamb and its mother. Above it is the human love existing between man and woman. In literary terms, both, for Wordsworth, belong to a world of romance: a "green bower" (xiv, 176) of gratified desire where the poet enjoys the perpetual ease of "spontaneous overflow." This world of romance residing in the poet's blood and heart during the period of "thoughtless youth" [T.A., 90) is momentarily revived by Wordsworth in the opening lines of The Prelude as he contemplates the "long months of ease and undisturbed delight" (1, 26) that await him in "a known Vale" (1, 72). Committed, however, to some larger epic undertaking, Wordsworth cannot remain for long at ease there. However delightful it may be in the words of the 1805 version to "linger, lull'd and lost, and rapt away" (xiv, 159), such delight is, in the "severer interventions" (1, 355) of the poet's revising mind in the 1850 version, "pitiable" (xiv, 180). And it is pitiable because, in celebrating the animal and human forms of love, the poet's joy falls short of its transcendent object. In the 1805 version, this transcendent object is the mind itself, described by Wordsworth as "the brooding Soul" (xiv, 165); in the 1850 version, it is externalized as the Hebrew-Christian God who, seated upon his throne, re­ ceives "heaven inspired" tribute "on the knees of prayer" and "the wings of praise" (xiv, 184-86). Whatever one thinks of the substitution of "the Almighty's Throne" (xiv, 187) for "the brooding Soul," the fact remains that Wordsworth's subject in The Prelude is the growth of his own poetic mind. Looking into it (almost as the English Studies in Ca n ad a, i , 4 (winter 1975) poet in "The Fall of Hyperion" looks into "the dark secret chamber of [Moneta's] skull" [i, 278]), Wordsworth in 1800 believed that he had as a poet surpassed Milton by virtue of the direction of his gaze. Milton, Wordsworth argued, by his reliance upon an obsolete theology, had avoided a more direct coming to grips with his own inherent powers. Compared to the revelations awaiting Wordsworth in the recesses of his own poetic mind, Milton's "heaven of heavens" was, in Wordsworth's 1800 view, nothing more than a veiled image grounded in an inadequate understanding of the workings of the creative mind. He could, therefore, pass unalarmed "Jehovah-with his thunder, and the choir / Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones," finding as he did something altogether more fearful and awesome in the mysterious workings of his own brain. For Milton's mythos of God, Wordsworth substituted a new and radical mythos of mind. So long, of course, as Wordsworth was content to remain as a poet in a world of romance, his theme of imagination was limited to the mind's marriage "to this goodly universe / In love and holy passion,” which would serve to reveal "Paradise, and groves / Elysian" in the immediate world of eye and ear, nature becoming an icon of the mind's desire. Like Milton before him, however, Wordsworth's ceaseless "mental fight" drove him beyond the vision of an earthly paradise with the inherent limitations it imposed upon the reach of mind. If the poetic mind was to be revealed in its "absolute" (xiv, 190), as distinct from relative, power, competing with and even surpassing Milton's mythos of God, then it would have to be explored in what Wordsworth calls its "strength / Of usurpation" (vi, 599-600). For Wordsworth the mind dwells "above" (xiv, 450) rather than within "this frame of things," is "of quality and fabric more...

Higher Education: Challenge and Possibilities

Many in and out of the profession are increasingly concerned about the threat of big ess and con tinued expansion to teaching and to the entire educa tional process. We must, all of us, confront the threat with honesty and courage. Instead of bemoaning what is perhaps inevitable except in a very few schools, we must make the most serious efforts to keep our struc tures human and personal. Administrators in particular must give this problem major consideration. Teachers, not so much by statement as by example, must show a concern for the quality and relevancy of their teaching and research, a sensitivity to the needs and expectations of the young people who sit in class and seminar. They must, with an eye constantly on the future, develop dif ferent modes for the educational encounter, and find new ways of strengthening modes that have proved valuable. They must find techniques of making the lec ture a better vehicle for the flow of ideas, of making the seminar a genuine clearing house for new findings and insights. They must explore the many possibilities of informal settings, from the living room to the university commons to the dining hall, as opportunities for the sort of small, person to person exchange of viewpoint that may prove a true paradigm for the experience of five, ten, and twenty years hence. Suggested here is the need for innovation, not as a goal in itself, not at the expense of the professional de mands made on all of us, but as a way of breathing freshness into the consideration of the great questions of literature, history, and philosophy, of all the areas that a university takes as its province. What is further sug gested is that this innovation is the responsibility not just of teachers who are most intimately involved in the classroom situation, but of deans, provosts, even busy presidents, those more closely associated with guiding the programs, planning, and financial priorities of the campuses. No sooner does one advance the case for a greater degree of personality in the university than he faces the very relevant question of how all of this is related to the large questions of the professor's specific responsibility to his profession. Many modern academic sins can, of course, be tied to the cult of personality. Teaching as a kind of demonstration of virtuosity for large, uncritical audiences, as an expression of a certain exhibitionist temperament ; the great breaking down of proper divid ing lines between professor and student; the caricatur ing of research that all too often serves as a defense of one's own inadequacies; all of these are matters too clear to need much amplification. And yet they are real problems that in the long run may make higher educa tion into a great leveling process ; a 20th century version of the Academy of Lagado, or a bargain basement epi sode removed from truly human concerns. I suppose I am proposing my own variation of Whitehead's rhyth mic claims of freedom and discipline as an answer to the tension I suggest, or my own version of Keats' poet in The Fall of Hyperion, a man not a dreamer but one committed to the real and the human.

Keats, Milton, and The Fall of Hyperion

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.

The Disputed Lines in The Fall of Hyperion

The Disputed Lines in <i>The Fall of Hyperion</i>

"THE FALL OF HYPERION"の構成

"THE FALL OF HYPERION"の構成

Moneta's Temple

What goes into a masterpiece is one thing. The form in which it emerges is another. What happens between, mechanics or miracle, is a third. This note is a summary statement, for a single passage in The Fall of Hyperion, A Vision, of the first of the three alone. It has developed through a series of surprises, as again and again some fact the bearing of which had been unnoticed has proved to be an element in a complex design—a design which has nevertheless achieved the effect of an effortless simplicity. It has to do, in a word, with an extraordinary convergence of impressions which, through their blendings, took form in an imaginative conception of rare beauty—a conception in which five themes interweave, almost as in a great symphonic movement: themes drawn, amazingly, from Greece, Judea, Egypt, the island of Staffa, and the Mount of Purgatory. That, I am well aware, is a statement which may not be lightly made, and warrant for it must be given.

The Meaning of Hyperion

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.”