Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, despite their status as fragments, represent Keats’s successful forays into epic territory. Keats had long been preoccupied by the myth of Hyperion and his hope was to write an epic that would propel him into the lofty poetic realm where ‘epic was of all the king, / Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn’s ring’.1 Hyperion was largely composed between late September 1818 and the death of Tom Keats on 1 December 1818, and eventually abandoned in April 1819 before its publication in 1820. Keats had begun writing The Fall in mid‐July 1819 but gave up around 21 September 1819, and it was never published in his lifetime. Yet these fragments reveal what Herbert Tucker calls ‘tantalizingly consummate imperfection’,2 where the poet’s burning desire to write the high language of epic propels the poetry forward, investing both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion with a yearning that moves the apparently impersonal genre of epic towards the condition of lyric intensity. ‘The two Hyperions read each other’;3 both fragments manage to attain epic grandeur even as they collapse under the weight of their achievement.
For Jack Stillinger, Hyperion marks a dividing line: ‘for all its astonishing epic resplendence, [the poem] just sits there apart from the rest, like Saturn himself, “quiet as stone” (Hyperion, I. 4), almost as if it had been written by someone other than Keats.’4 The sense of strangeness comes through as the poem begins after an event rather than in its midst, divorced from personal avowal, allowing the fallen gods to take centre‐stage. Unlike Paradise Lost, which begins after the defeat of the fallen angels only to shift to the larger action, the Fall of Adam and Eve, there is no sense that any action will follow. Book 1 moves from Saturn’s mournful passivity and loss of identity, to Thea’s pity, to Hyperion’s fearful rage, where Book 2 recalls Paradise Lost’s council of fallen angels, only to replace their energy and hatred with a numbed despair, and Book 3 stages an encounter between Mnemosyne and Apollo which shows the latter affirm the dizzying power of his newfound divinity. Within the three books, Hyperion moves from elegizing the defeat of the Titans to celebrating the advent of a new order. Each emotional inflection is masterfully sculpted as Keats’s poetry captures the subtleties of tone generated, in part, by his choice to engage in ‘writing a poem which does not have a clear case to make’.5 The sorrowful solitude of Hyperion begins immediately in Keats’s description of Saturn’s broken fallenness:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat grey‐haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity (Hyperion 1.1–12)
Saturn’s deadened posture oppresses the description. Keats has nature stifled ‘By reason of his fallen divinity’. Numbed in its exile from ‘the healthy breath of morn’, the oppressive situation mirrors his dethroned state. Repeated clauses fill the lines, as ‘Forest on forest’ and ‘cloud on cloud’ weigh down the blank verse, stilling it into the sullen atmosphere appropriate for mourning the loss of worldly dominion.6 The dominating ‘s’ sounds slow down the lines until Thea’s pity enters the poem as she arrives to share ‘our weary griefs’ (Hyperion 1.66) in a sorrowful frieze of joy departed from the world. Saturn’s confusion over his shattered identity offers an affecting pathos: ‘I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left / My strong identity, my real self, / Somewhere between the throne and where I sit’ (Hyperion 1.112–15). Here, Saturn’s defeat seems actively chosen; it is he who has left behind who he was, and this confusion between being defeated and choosing exile suggests the bewilderment suffered by the dispossessed Titan. Defeat and loss of status breed loss of self, and Keats does not flinch from presenting Saturn’s misery at losing his creativity in lines that seem both personal in a metapoetic sense and epically striking:
But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to naught? (Hyperion 1.141–4)
Keats keeps the lines relevant to his own poetic ambition without becoming openly personal. Saturn’s questioning witnesses a desire to create something entirely new, completely without reference to any pre‐existing order, and the spectre of Milton rises in the lines as the fashioner of an epic world which Keats cannot escape. Keats wrote, ‘I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written but in the vein of art—I wish to devote myself to another sensation.’7 But Hyperion thrives on this tension, as Keats senses a place for his own epic achievement in the wake of Milton just as Apollo feels that ‘the liegeless air / Yields to my step aspirant’ (Hyperion 3.92–3).
Book 2 collects together the broken Titans, where the strongest are ‘Dungeoned in opaque element, to keep / Their clenchèd teeth still clenched, and all their limbs / Locked up like veins of metal, cramped and screwed’ (Hyperion 2.23–5). Shifting from physical agonies to the despairing suffering of the unimprisoned Titans, this version of Paradise Lost’s council of Hell is marked by passivity. Saturn cannot rouse them into an energetic response to their loss nor can he ask them to remain fallen: ‘O Titans, shall I say, “Arise!”?—Ye groan: / Shall I say “Crouch!”?—Ye groan. What can I then?’ (Hyperion 2.157–8). Oceanus, described as ‘Sophist and sage from no Athenian grove’ (Hyperion 2.168), gives a speech that for Herbert Tucker offers ‘somewhat deliberate cheer’.8 But this is not ‘cheer’ so much as an attempt to find a reason for suffering, poignant in both its effort to dispel pain and its inevitable failure:
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquered, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos. (2.212–17)
This prophecy, borne from meeting his younger Olympian counterpart, cannot assuage the suffering experienced by the Titans, despite Clymene’s testimony of a similar experience. ‘Fresh perfection’ and the abstract sense of perfectibility cannot assuage pain. Oceanus’ sophistry can offer intelligent argument but not emotional succour, and Keats’s poetry captures the eloquent force of Oceanus’ ideas even as it reveals that reason does not unseat feeling. The poet raises no more than two cheers for the relentless process of history. Enceladus’ rage and Hyperion’s return see the Titans attempt to rekindle their supremacy, shouting Saturn’s name from their ‘hollow throats’ (Hyperion 2.391). Yet, by Book 3, their woes remain, despite their momentary rallying against desolation.
Book 3 turns its attention away from the Titans to the birth of the new god, Apollo, ‘once more the golden theme!’ (Hyperion 3.28). Yet the poem witnesses no relief from pressure in its turn from the defeated to the victor. To borrow T. S. Eliot’s phrase, in the case of Apollo, ‘this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony’.9 Of the Titans, Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, demands an explanation for Apollo’s weeping, and Apollo describes the ‘dark, dark, / And painful vile oblivion’ (Hyperion 3.86–7) that torments what ought to be sublime achievement.
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, grey 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, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal. (Hyperion 3.113–20)
Knowledge transfigures Apollo, as ‘wild commotions shook him’ (Hyperion 3.124) as the poet experiences the electric force of history, listed as ‘Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, sovran voices, agonies’, showing Apollo speeding through the annals of history. His brain becomes the site for history to be reconceived through the poet’s eyes. ‘Creatings and destroyings’, though listed as part of the ideas to which he has access, signals the poetic power available to Apollo, a power which looks forward to The Fall of Hyperion and the speaker’s drinking of ‘That full draught [which] is parent of my theme’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.46). Yet Apollo’s triumph is less than complete. Apollo ‘seems’, as Vincent Newey notes, ‘less a god being born than a man dying’.10 Edward Bostetter’s sense that the poem’s abandonment ‘was a sign of doubt and imaginative failure’ downplays Keats’s achievement in Hyperion,11 which reveals a perplexed power.
The Fall of Hyperion puts poetry centre‐stage, revealing Keats’s ‘vale of Soul‐making’ as dependent on vision wrested into poetry by disciplined struggle.12 Drawing an immediate distinction between fanatic and dreamer, Keats weaves, like the fanatics he describes, an intricate relationship between poetry and vision. Though fanatics dream, Keats emphasizes the significance of poetry, which offers the only medium to facilitate vision: ‘For Poesy alone can tell her dreams’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.8). The task of the reader comes to the fore, where we are called upon to participate in the poetic vision in the role of auditor, but unlike Shelley’s Defence, where the musician is ‘unseen’,13 Keats places himself in our line of vision:
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. (The Fall of Hyperion 1.16–18)
Where Milton addressed his muse at the opening of Paradise Lost, Keats’s self‐reflexive epic addresses the reader. Almost formulated as a challenge to the recipient of these lines, the stakes are overtly acknowledged; Keats must be judged. The reader’s role anticipates Moneta’s later role, which, as Stuart Sperry claims, shows Keats assigning her the ‘role of interrogator and judge on the one hand and intercessor and redeemer on the other’.14 Though Helen Vendler sees Moneta as a figure who stands for a denial of audience,15 Moneta seems more aptly described as a figure of the ‘eternal Being, the principle of Beauty, – and the Memory of great Men’ that Keats places in opposition to the public,16 but it is a figure that still ‘reads’ Keats, just as posterity will judge ‘this warm scribe my hand’. Despite Keats’s frequent and near irritable claims to avoid courting his reader,17 here, the compact between reader and poet is in the foreground. The lines, concentrated and distinctly preoccupied with what John Barnard calls his desire to ‘question the limits and sufficiency of the imagination’s claim to truth’,18 show Keats loading every rift with ore. The limits and possibilities of the imagination and its effect on the reader become central to the poem’s achievement, an achievement which Keats forces the reader to consider before moving into his poetic vision. Vision in The Fall of Hyperion is attended by struggle:
I heard, I looked: two senses both at once,
So fine, so subtle, felt the tyranny
Of that fierce threat, and the hard task proposed.
Prodigious seemed the toil; the leaves were yet
Burning—when suddenly a palsied chill
Struck from the pavèd level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat.
I shrieked; and the sharp anguish of my shriek
Stung my own ears—I strove hard to escape
The numbness, strove to gain the lowest step.
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasped my hands I felt them not. (The Fall of Hyperion 1.118–31)
Metapoetic in the extreme, the tyrannous demands of the epic place enormous pressure on the apprentice poet. The shriek, which recalls Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, underscores the demands of visionary process. Forced to hear and to look at once, as the toil becomes climactic, Keats uses the blank verse to make it mimetic of his struggle. ‘Slow, heavy, deadly’ like a bell are adjectives that toll Keats back to his sole self, a self he places under visionary stress. Though temping to read the lines as Jonathon Shears does when he notes ‘a curious masochism in the fact that Keats chooses Moneta or memory when he desires to escape the influence of Milton’,19 the struggle against Milton’s influence also seems reminiscent of the Spenserian quest to earn the rewards of Romance. Keats deliberately stages the struggle to become an epic protagonist in his epic poem. The difficulty of such a task is not understated. Keats fails repeatedly in his own eyes, buckled by the intensity of his vision:
Without stay or prop,
But my own weak mortality, I bore
The load of this eternal quietude,
The unchanging gloom, and the three fixèd shapes (The Fall of Hyperion 1.388–91)
‘The unchanging gloom’ oppresses the poet, forcing him to sit, as he writes to Shelley, ‘with [his] wings furl’d’.20 The load to bear becomes almost too heavy, as Moneta seems to displace Keats from his poem. The close of canto 1 shows Keats turn over his epic task to her, shifting from telling the tale to recording her talk. Memory becomes the site of epic daring, and it is memory of her speech that must be delivered: ‘I must delay, and glean my memory / Of her high phrase—perhaps no further dare’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.467–8). Canto 2 opens in her voice, as she assures the poet that this vision is ‘Too huge for mortal tongue’ (The Fall of Hyperion 2.9), diminishing the poet’s capacity to ‘tell [his] dreams’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.8) with ‘the fine spell of words’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.9) required. Yet this marks no failure of the visionary poet, who recovers himself to take possession of his vision. Unlike Hyperion, the close of the poem remains in the first person; the words ‘[m]y quick eyes ran on’ (The Fall of Hyperion 2.53) reveal Keats as embedded in his epic. He underscores his status as visionary arbiter who has proven capable of ‘sav[ing] / Imagination from the sable charm / And dumb enchantment’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.10–11).