“If I weren't a conqueror, I would wish to be a sculptor”

—Napoleon

Few would disagree that Keats's Hyperion, with its depiction of the overthrow of Saturn by the Olympian gods, of one form of power and sovereignty being displaced by another, has something to do with politics, especially with the French Revolution and its impact upon English political life. Nor would many question the assertion that the poem is concerned, above all, with aesthetic change, the life and death of sculptural forms. Indeed, one of the unique aspects of Keats's representation of the Titans is that they never fully escape being seen as sculptures. They occupy a threshold space somewhere between life and statuary, as both gods and surviving sculptural artifacts of an ancient culture; we see them with a kind of double-vision and are continually made aware, throughout the poem, of the movement of the Titans between these states—as statues become gods, and gods slowly turn to stone. The relationship between politics and aesthetics in the poem, however, has not been adequately understood. Because Keats's ostensive subject is sculpture, rather than people, the poem should not be read as a simple allegory of the French Revolution. Instead, the politics of the poem are mediated by its aesthetic concerns: from our recognition of these gods as sculptural forms and from the manner in which Keats represents the historical life and vicissitudes of sculpture.¹

Though the striking influence of Keats's reading of Paradise Lost over the winter of 1817-1818 on the style and concerns of Hyperion has long been recognized, it should be equally noted that the poem subordinates this epic pattern to the formal and ideological demands of the “progress poem,” one of the most important, and most encyclopedic, of eighteenth-century genres. Eighteenth-century writers often focussed on the origin and development of a single institution—of civil government, language, property, religion, law, wealth, or poetry—but each was guided by the great visionary theme of the age: to describe a general progress at work in all spheres of human life, whether political, artistic, scientific, moral, or religious. Marilyn Butler, in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, has argued that this view of history is essentially a liberal one, and concludes that Hyperion aimed “to represent historical change as the liberal habitually sees it: continuous, inevitable, and on the most universal level grand, for it is Progress—the survival of the fittest, the best, the most beautiful and the quintessentially human.”² There is a good deal of evidence to support this claim. Both Apollo's claim that “Knowledge enormous makes a God of me” and Oceanus' argument that “'tis the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might” suggest that Keats's original plan for Hyperion was to depict the history of art as a general progress and triumph of beauty (iii: 113; ii: 228-29).³ “So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,” declares Oceanus;

                                        “A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness.”

(ii: 212-15)

In a letter written to Benjamin Haydon, early in 1818, Keats explicitly links Hyperion to the liberal ideology of progress and to its political exemplar—Napoleon Bonaparte. “The nature of Hyperion,” he writes, “will lead me to treat it in a more naked and grecian Manner—and the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating—and one great contrast between them [Hyperion and Endymion] will be—that the Hero of the written tale [Endymion] being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance; whereas the Apollo in Hyperion being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one.”⁴ In Keats's plan for the poem, the actions of Apollo would be modeled upon those of Napoleon, Apollo achieving in the sphere of poetry and the arts what Napoleon had attempted, yet failed, to achieve, in society: the progressive dismantling of aristocratic and religious institutions of power. Oceanus' assertion of a new kind of power, that “first in beauty should be first in might,” rewrites political revolution in non-violent, aesthetic terms. Apollo's actions, though patterned upon those of Napoleon, will go far beyond those of Napoleon, making him but an epigone of progress. Where Napoleon was “led by circumstance,” Apollo will be a “fore-seeing God” who shapes “his actions like one”: the “march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating.”

Though Keats's letter to Haydon leaves little doubt that Hyperion was originally intended to celebrate history and progress, there is reason to question the assertion that this is an adequate description of the politics of the poem Keats actually wrote. In fact, rather than giving us a simple statement of Keats's political views, the letter is more a mirror of the politics of its addressee, Benjamin Haydon, who was well known for his idolatry of Napoleon and his love of the grand, epic and historical style. Keats, elsewhere, though in the context of Hyperion, draws attention to the fact that “not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature,” because “the identity of every one” presses so much upon him that he finds it difficult to know when he is “speaking from myself” or “from some character in whose soul I now live.”⁵ Though it is hardly unusual that two friends might share the same political viewpoint, we should nevertheless be wary of reading Keats's letters without reference to their addressees, as if they were direct expressions of a set of clearly formulated and firmly held political ideas. A political standpoint may be a matter of feeling, but to articulate a political position one needs words, and often one of the political functions of speech is to place ourselves in a political situation which may not actually be our own. I would suggest that in his letter to Hayden we find less an expression of Keats's political viewpoint than an instance of his attempt to adopt a political language, Haydon's large-canvas liberalism. Since Keats's description of the conflict between the shaping powers of his heroes and “circumstance” is also very much a description of his own powers as a writer, might we not extend this insight to our reading of Hyperion to suggest that in the poem Keats attempted to take up the ideology of progress in the same manner as he adopted Milton's style? The depiction in Hyperion of Apollo's coming into power, then, would have been coincident both with Keats's emergence from epigone to epic poet—shaping rather than being shaped by circumstance—and with his assumption of a political voice.

Keats's effort to adopt a language of progress is apparent in a well-known letter, written about four months after the one to Haydon. In explaining to J. H. Reynolds the difference between Milton's and Wordsworth's poetry, Keats argues that though Milton was as capable of philosophical thought as Wordsworth, “he did not think into the human heart.” This difference is not attributable to Wordsworth's genius, he observes, but, instead, proves that mankind is subject to “a general and gregarious advance of intellect … a grand march of intellect—, It proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being, whether it be in human Knowledge or Religion.” Removed from its epistolary context, this assertion would seem evidence of Keats's ardent liberalism. But almost immediately Keats qualifies this interpretation, by indicating that the true reason for his setting this theory down in writing, for his “scribbling,” is not to articulate longstanding beliefs, for he had “read these things before,” and yet “never had even a thus dim perception of them.” Instead writing is a means of learning to talk in a certain way, of familiarizing himself with these ideas and committing them to memory. Keats looked at liberalism as a language and a “lesson” to be learned: “I like to say my lesson to one who will endure my tediousness for my own sake.”⁶ To become an epic poet, one not only needed a subject and style; one also needed an acceptable political language, one that Keats, in the months immediately preceding the composition of Hyperion was hard at work learning.

The problem one faces, then, in approaching the question of the politics of the poem is not simply one of finding instances where Keats employs the language of liberalism, but also one of examining whether Keats felt comfortable with his adopted tongue and did not find his political feelings and situation to be at odds with the politics of his epic intention. I would suggest that though Hyperion may originally have been intended as the poem in which Keats would show that he had learned his lesson well, it is certainly equally true that the poem Keats actually wrote—like Shelley's Triumph of Life—is skeptical and critical not only of the idea of progress, but also of the genre from which it initially derived.

A surprising aspect of Keats criticism is that though scholars have explored in detail the reasons for Keats's conflation of the giants and the Titans, they have generally ignored a more interesting question: why, given that sculptural form occupies such an important place in the poem, are the Titans depicted as Egyptian, rather than Greek sculptures? Keats had recently seen the dark, powerful forms of Egyptian sculpture and architecture in the British Museum and would also have been aware of the contemporary interest in Egyptian art. He would also have known of current speculation that early Greek art had developed from Egyptian sculpture. Haydon, recounting in 1811 his visits to the Elgin marbles, when they were still housed in a dark shed in Park Street, makes this association when he writes that he “was peculiarly impressed with the feeling of being among the ruins of two mighty People[s]—Egyptians and Grecians.”⁷ More importantly, however, in both Enlightenment and romantic aesthetics, Egyptian art was the foil against which Classical beauty was measured. It epitomized the art of the Orient: a sublime, half-human art, which was intimately connected, in the minds of nineteenth-century travellers, with despotic power and priestly mystery. The Quarterly Review, which Keats was reading at the time, typifies the association made between Egyptian art and a certain form of political power: “The condition of those, by whose labour the mighty masses of the pyramids were reared, mountains cut down or excavated, and colossal statues formed, was probably not better than that of the modern Nubians—such works could only have been accomplished by men who fed on food as cheap as the lentils and sour milk of the Arabs—the slaves of some despot, himself the slave of a crafty and tyranical priesthood.”⁸ In a poem that aimed to show the progress of art from the sublime to the beautiful, from a despotic and sacerdotal art to an enlightened art emancipated “from the great superstition,”⁹ in a poem recounting how the man-centered art and politics of Classical Greece emerged from its displacement of its crude, half-human origins, Egyptian art was the obvious choice for an art deserving supersession. It is significant, however, that Keats, by introducing Egyptian art into the poem, radically transformed the meaning of the war of the Titans and the Classical Gods: the war was restructured along an east-west axis, less as a theogeny within a single culture than as an international event, a confrontation between the gods of Europe and those of the Orient. As Ronald Paulson has argued, the movement of the poem from the sublime to the beautiful depicts the progress of the French Revolution, from the Terror that displaced the aristocracy to a subsequent peace.¹⁰ The inclusion of Egypt makes this progress of “creations and destroyings” a world-wide event.

Since Keats planned the progress of Apollo to be an aesthetic rewriting of the progress of Napoleon, the fact that Napoleon did, indeed, invade Egypt, in 1798, that there actually was a violent encounter between the East and the West, is of major importance to our understanding of the central issues of Hyperion. A distinctive feature of Napoleon's Expedition of 1798 was that it was not represented strictly as a military invasion, but was more generally perceived as a major cultural and scientific event: the beginning of a process whereby modern thought would unlock the mysteries of the Orient. In addition to his army, Napoleon assembled a Scientific Brigade, composed of members of France's Commission of Sciences and Arts, whose task it was, in addition to providing technical and strategic advice, to advance the cause of science in Egypt and to study and publish a full account of Egyptian history and culture. These studies were published between 1809 and 1828 in E. F. Jomard's twenty-volume Description of Egypt, a work that is generally viewed as the beginning of modern Orientalism. As Haydon observes: “The French expedition to Egypt has been proved a great delight to the learned, by the exposition of several cities, which no single Traveller could explore before. The consequence to us Painters is a complete series of the costumes, features, & manners of the inhabitants, copied from their temples, still perfect & uninjured. They are worth the sacrifice they have made.”¹¹ Despite the irony of Haydon's mention of sacrifice, it is clear that he viewed the Expedition as an important event for artists. The Expedition placed art and politics under the banner of progress. It aimed at freeing a nation long held in bondage to the despotic government of the Ottomans, at providing Egypt with the science and government that would allow it to enter the modern world, and, at recovering, through science, the meaning of an art fallen into decay and a language lost in time. Though it is questionable whether Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign benefited Egyptian culture, it certainly deified Napoleon. Through this expedition, Napoleon became identified with the aims and achievements of the French Revolution (he was, in fact, made First Consul immediately upon his return to France). In Victor Hugo's “Lui,” the east-west progress of the sun, of history and of Napoleon, are found to be same:

                                        By the Nile, I find him once again.
Egypt shines with the fires of his dawn;
His imperial star rises in the Orient.
Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements,
Prodigious, he astonished the land of prodigies.(12)

(40-44)

It is likely that when Keats describes Apollo's deification, “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me,” he was less concerned with Greek mythology than with the manner in which aesthetic and historical knowledge and power came together in the figure of Napoleon and the promise of revolutionary France. The Expedition of 1798 not only embodied an idea of historical and political progress, but also made the aesthetic claim that the destructive aspects of progress could be offset through scientific expertise, the meaning of superseded cultures could be restored. By so doing, it made aesthetic appreciation, the degree to which one can recover the life of the past, a political issue. In a letter written during the composition of Hyperion, Keats hopes that, like Apollo, he too can revive the meaning of the Orient: “We with our bodily eyes see but the fashion and Manners of one country for one age,” he writes, “—and then we die—Now to me manners and customs long since passed whether among the Babylonions or the Bactrians are as real, or even more real than those among which I now live—My thoughts have turned lately this way.”¹³ Yet what is surprising about the first two books of Hyperion is that rather than celebrating the “knowledge enormous” of Apollo, Keats is preoccupied with the losses, rather than the gains, arising from progress and with the immense difficulties involved in bringing statuary to life. The failure of the French Revolution and of Napoleon can be read, then, in the hermeneutical difficulties of aesthetic appreciation.

One of the more important insights of Hyperion is that the Titans are products of the human mind; their life and power depend upon their being represented in stone. Through displacement, the Titans gain this insight into the source of their power: they come to recognize that because their divinity and power derived from their aesthetic form, from their being sculpture, “the first-born of all shap'd and palpable Gods” (ii: 153), their divinity and power were also subject to the historical vicissitudes of sculpture, the losses of meaning that attend political and cultural change. Saturn is initially represented as a piece of statuary, buried, “quiet as a stone,” deep within the earth, and the reader, having made a downward movement to recover him, is immediately confronted with the problem of how to awaken this ancient, superseded god from his stony sleep, how to give meaning to a “still,” “deadened” piece of sculpted stone: “It seem'd no force could wake [Saturn] from his place” (i: 22). More than seventy lines and a moon's slow movement through its “seasons four upon the night” are required before Saturn is moved from self-absorption to lift up his “faded eyes,” only to find that he is now but the sign of his former self—a sculpture—that points toward a “godlike exercise” (i: 107) of power and a time that no longer exists. With “palsied tongue,” he attempts to explain this change:

                                                            “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
Here on this spot of earth. …
Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest
A certain shape or shadow, making way
With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile: it must—it must
Be a ripe progress—Saturn must be King.”

(i: 112-25)

The sign of Saturn, like the identity of Lear, which the passage echoes, has been progressively darkened, for now he can only shadow forth what he once signified. Through a series of questions Lear attempts to understand the relationship between power and its representation: “Does any here know me? This is not Lear: / Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eye? … Who is it that can tell me who I am?” To these questions the Fool answers, “Lear's shadow” (1.4.234-39), thus indicating that Lear has been transformed into a type or icon of his past power. Similarly, Saturn no longer sees himself as a god, but as a spectral darkness making its way to regain a lost throne.

If Hyperion is a poem that celebrates progress, the description of the face of Thea, like “that of a Memphian sphinx, / Pedestal'd haply in a palace court, / When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore” (i: 31-33) is even more problematic. Rather than valorizing the beauty that succeeds sublimity, Keats values the “sorrow” of Egyptian sculpture, a sorrow that derives from its ability to incorporate within itself a premonition of its eclipse and loss of meaning:

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.

(i: 35-41)

Thea's prophetic sorrow looks beyond “the vanward clouds of evil days” to a time when Egypt will be invaded and destroyed by the artillery of advancing troops, “a sullen rear … with its stored thunder labouring up.”

Rather than depicting history as a progress towards increasing light and knowledge, a new sun rising in the west, Keats depicts it as a continuous process of displacement, of one sun supplanting and darkening another. Though a sign as sign can achieve a certain kind of permanence, its meaning is less resistant to change and loss. The Titans, as signs standing on the threshold of nonmeaning, are caught in a “deathwards [progress] to no death.”¹⁴ This process, in which the gods of an earlier time progressively lose their meaning to become unspeaking signs, is epitomized by the fall of Hyperion, the sun-god of the Orient. Initially, Keats, aware that hieroglyphs were often carved onto the interior walls of Egyptian monuments, describes how Hyperion's “winged minions,” that had stood “within each aisle and deep recess” of his palace “in close clusters” (i: 196-97) slowly pass from “dreams,” “monstrous forms,” “effigies,” “spectres,” and “Phantoms” (i: 227-30), into hieroglyphs decorating the remnants of a palatial ruin:

                                                                      Hieroglyphics old
Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
Then living on the earth, with labouring thought
Won from the gaze of many centuries:
Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
Of stone, or marble swart; their import gone,
Their wisdom long since fled.—

(i: 277-83)

Since the Rosetta Stone, though discovered by Napoleon's Expedition in 1799, was not deciphered until approximately two years after the composition of Hyperion, Keats's reference to hieroglyphs is to a dead language, whose meaning has been totally lost in time. Immediately thereafter, in a passage modelled upon Milton's description of Satan's incarnation in the serpent, Hyperion feels an agony gradually creep “from the feet unto the crown / Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular / Making slow way” (i: 260-62) and, for the first time, we see him as statuary—as Laocoön. In our final view of him, he has become the Statue of Memnon, a sculpture that sings in the light of another sun:

                    a vast shade,
In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk
Of Memnon's image at the set of sun
To one who travels from the dusking East:
Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon's harp
He utter'd, while his hands contemplative
He press'd together, and in silence stood.

(ii: 372-78)

Twilight and dawn converge upon Hyperion, stationed on a granite peak, ushering in the day of his supersession, singing in a voice that will be stifled or silenced by history.

Hyperion's loss of voice was supposed to have ushered in the voice of Apollo and of Keats. Strikingly, that new voice is absent from the text, except for the hasty draft of Book iii, which itself ends in Apollo's “shriek.” If Keats began Hyperion with the intention of adopting not only an Enlightenment genre, but also a political ideology, his discomfort with this language, with the notion of progress, can be seen throughout the poem, and is repeatedly addressed in the later poetry, as Keats attempts to deal with his sense that he is, perhaps, as much an outsider in politics as he was in poetry, that finding a language of politics might be as difficult as finding one for poetry. The promise of Apollo, like the promise of Napoleon, was never fulfilled. In the Fall of Hyperion, Apollo is “faded” and “far flown”; in Lamia he has become Apollonius, the sage whose wisdom can only destroy. In these poems, Keats writes less about making history than about being its victim; history takes on the character, less of a “progress,” than of a ritual sacrifice. Yet this turn toward ritual and loss is not a reflection of conservatism. Nor would it be correct to say that it is an escape from politics. Instead, Keats's inability to speak in an assured political voice and his discomfort with the political languages that were available to him as a poet constitute, in themselves, a political viewpoint. Keats was not a spokesman for the working class, but there is in his poetry an identification, perhaps to some extent personal in origin, with the suffering and silence of political outsiders, with those who lack power and a public, political voice—the victims of history. The politics of Keats's later poetry has little to do with high liberalism or conservatism, but instead represents an identification with those anonymous groups whose political voice cannot yet be heard in either poetry or English politics: with towns “emptied of … folk,” streets “evermore silent,” and souls that cannot “tell / Why thou art desolate.”¹⁵

Notes

1. For influential approaches to the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Keats's poetry, see Geoffrey Hartman, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's ‘To Autumn,’” The Fate of Reading, and Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 124-46; Jerome McGann, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979) 988-1032; and Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale U P, 1983) 283-85.

2. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. (New York: Oxford U P, 1982) 153.

3. All notes in parentheses are to Hyperion, in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1982).

4. Letter #53 to Benjamin R. Haydon, 23 January 1818, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1958) 1: 207.

5. Letter #118 to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, Letters 1: 387-88.

6. Letter #80 to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Letters 1: 281-82.

7. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1960) i: 195.

8. Quarterly Review 16 (October 1816): 21.

9. Letter #80 to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Letters 1: 281.

10. Representations of Revolution 283-85.

11. Diary 1: 375.

12. Victor Hugo: Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Massin, 18 vols. (Paris: Le Club Français du live, 1967) iii: 601.

13. Letter #137 to The George Keatses, 31 December 1818, Letters 2: 18.

14. The Fall of Hyperion lines 260-61.

15. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 37-40.