Hyperion Flashcards
Sources of Hyperion
1) At school he as said to have known the classical dictionary by heart
2) Inspired by Elizabethan poets and their translations of classic story
Begining of the poem
The situation when the poem opens is as follows:–Saturn, king of the gods, has been driven from Olympus down into a deep dell, by his son Jupiter, who has seized and used his father’s weapon, the thunderbolt. A similar fate has overtaken nearly all his brethren Keats then focalises on Tellus and Coelus, the earth and sky. Before the separation of earth and sky, Chaos, a confusion of the elements of all things, had reigned supreme. One only of the Titans, Hyperion the sun-god, still keeps his kingdom, and he is about to be superseded by young Apollo, the god of light and song.
How many books did Ketas initially intend Hyperion to have
10
According to Dr de Selincourt how would it have ended
conceive that Apollo, now conscious of his divinity, would have gone to Olympus, heard from the lips of Jove of his newly-acquired supremacy, and been called upon by the rebel three to secure the kingdom that awaited him. He would have gone forth to meet Hyperion, who, struck by the power of supreme beauty, would have found resistance impossible
According to Dr de Selincourt why would an actual battle not be how Keats intended to end Hyperion?
1) In the first place, he had the example of Milton, whom he was studying very closely, to warn him of its dangers
2) if Hyperion had been meant to fight he would hardly be represented as already, before the battle, shorn of much of his strength; thus making the victory of Apollo depend upon his enemy’s unnatural weakness and not upon his own strength
3) goes against the whole idea of the poem as Keats conceived it, and as, in fact, it is universally interpreted from the speech of Oceanus in the second book that beauty and intellectual dominance is superior to physical strength
why did Keats break off the poem?
Because it was too ‘milton’
In what ways is Hyperion miltonic?
- subject recalls Paradise lost e.g. the council of the fallen gods very similar to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton’s epic
- stylistically and syntactically:
1) the restraint and concentration of the language,VERY different to the wordiness of Keats’s early work,
2) the constant use of classical constructions,
3) Miltonic inversions and repetitions
4) occasional reminiscences of actual lines and phrases in Paradise Lost
Shelley and Landor on Keats as a result of Hyperion
Despite his ignorance of the language, Keats was the most truly Greek of all English poets
