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1. Hyperion, an Epic Late in 1818, at about the end of his twenty-third year and while he was serving as nurse to his dying brother Tom, Keats planned to undertake an epic poem, modeled on Paradise Lost, that he called Hyperion. Greek mythology gave Keats its subject—the displacement of Saturn and his fellow Titans by a new generation of gods, Zeus and the other Olympians. But in engaging this topic Keats addressed the epic question at the center of Paradise Lost: how did evil come into the world and why? Keats in his story set out to represent an answer, not according to any one religious creed but in terms informed by his reading in comparative religion and mythology. The Titans had been fair and benign gods, and their rule had been a golden age of happiness. Yet at the beginning of the poem all the Titans except Hyperion, god of the sun, have been dethroned; and the uncomprehending Saturn again and again raises the question of how this injustice could have come to be. In book 3 of the original Hyperion, the scenes among the Titans are supplemented by the experience of the Olympian Apollo, still a youth but destined to displace Hyperion as the sun god among the heavenly powers. He lives in ''aching ignorance" of the universe and its processes but is aware of his ignorance and thirsts for knowledge. Suddenly Apollo reads in the face of his tutor Mnemosyne—goddess of memory, who will be mother of the Muses and so of all the arts—the silent record of the defeat of the Titans and at once soars to the knowledge that he seeks: the understanding, both intoxicating and agonizing, that life involves process, that process entails change and suffering, and that there can be no creative progress except by the defeat and destruction of the preceding stage. Apollo cries out: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me. . . . (Hyperion, Book III, 113-118) This opening out of Apollo's awareness to the tragic nature of life is what the Titans lacked. As the fragment breaks off, Apollo is transfigured—like one who should "with fierce convulse / Die into life"—not only into one who has earned the right to displace Hyperion as god of the sun, but also into the god of the highest poetry. (from the introduction of Norton Anthology) 2. The Fall of Hyperion: A Romantic Quest-Romance Keats abandoned this extraordinary fragment in April 1819. Late that summer, however, he took up the theme again, under the title The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. This time his primary model is Dante, whom he had been studying in Henry Cary's verse translation of 1814. In The Divine Comedy all the narrated events are represented as a vision granted to the poet at the beginning of the poem. In the same way Keats begins The Fall of Hyperion with a frame story whose central event is that the poet-protagonist, in a dream, falls from a paradisal landscape into a wasteland and there earns the right to a vision. That vision reincorporates the events narrated in the first Hyperion: Moneta (her Latin name suggests "the Admonisher"), who stands in the same relationship to the poet as, in the earlier tale, Mnemosyne stood to Apollo, permits, or challenges, this protagonist to remember, with her, her own memories of the fall of the Titans. By devising this frame story, Keats shifted his center of poetic concern from the narration of epic action to an account of the evolving consciousness of the epic poet, as he seeks to know his identity, to justify the morality of poetry, and to understand its place in the social world. The ordeal through which Apollo had become god of poetry is replaced in this second version of Hyperion by the ordeal of this one poet, who must prove himself able to endure the witnessing that Moneta demands of him and worthy of the power "To see as a God sees" (line 304) (from the introduction of Norton Anthology). 3. Themes of The Fall of Hyperion The structure of The Fall of Hyperion, assessed as a conscious integration of the Poet and his debates with Moneta, encourages a thematic consideration of the nature of art and beauty. In this version, the significance of the imagination is central. Here, the dream-vision structure emphasizes the Romantic tension between material representations and inner visions. The immortality offered by art, as opposed to human mortality ordivine immortality, contribute to thematic issues with life and death. Like Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion is concerned with both pleasure and pain as integral to life and asserts the predominance of suffering. Also expressed is the relationship between knowledge, suffering, and divine power. Perhaps the strongest theme presented by the poem is the Poet's identity and his responsibility to humankind.(from enote) 4. "The finest moment in Keats's poetry" "Those whom thou spak'st of are no visionaries," Rejoin'd that voice,-"they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice- They come not here, they have no thought to come And thou art here, for thou art less than they. What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thy self-think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shar'd, Such things as thou art are admitted oft Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, And suffer'd in these temples: for that cause Thou standest safe beneath this statue's knees." These lines are the culmination of Keats's work, and need the closest kind of reading, while they demand an energy of response which vitalizes the reader's imagination. Humanists, Moneta replies, are of two kinds, and Keats is alone in his generation in being the lesser kind, both a humanist and a visionary. The pragmatic humanists do not need the invented wonders of weak dreaming. The object of their quest is directly before them. They write no poems, for their music is in human happiness, and their truth and beauty in the human face. The poet is a fever of himself, caught in the anguish of his own selfhood. But the earth is enough, if he would but think of it, and the earth need surrender to no heaven. Those for whom the earth is not enough can have no home, and no happiness even in their own hopes. Having moved so close to Keats's own malady, his involvement in the pain of the unresolved contraries of nature and imagination, Moneta strikes at what is most central in Keats, his inability to unperplex joy from pain. Men, humanists or not, except the dreamer, can experience joy and pain unmixed. No line in Keats is more intense with baffled aspiration than the one that separates him from the generality of men: The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct The indictment seems crushing, and the rhetorical irony turned on Keats by Moneta is cruel. Such things as Keats is, Moneta tells him, are admitted into a state of innocence, that happiness may be somewhat shared, and are suffered within the temple of poetry. (from Harold Bloom's The Visionary Company)
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