SOURCE: Miller, Bruce E. “On the Incompleteness of Keats's Hyperion.” College Language Association Journal 8, no. 3 (March 1965): 234-39.

[In the following essay, Miller asserts that Keats left Hyperion incomplete because he could not resolve the philosophical dilemma created through his profession that the world will inherently improve over time and his uncertainty regarding universal fate and individual will.]

Scholars have asked why Keats did not finish a poem which begins as prosperously as Hyperion. As for explanations, Thorpe has indicated the possibility that Keats' love affair may have interfered with work on a heroic poem;¹ Colvin has suggested that Keats' sympathetic portrayal of the goodness and beauty of the Titans was so fine that he found he could not go on to express adequately the surpassing excellence of the Olympians, as the plan of the poem to be inferred from Oceanus' speech would require;² Shackford thinks that Keats ran into difficulties because he had with Oceanus' expository speech vitiated the interest of the narrative;³ and Murry believes that the poem is in a sense complete as Keats left it, that it expresses as much as Keats at that time had in mind about the progress of a young poet (which Murry takes to be a major theme of the poem).⁴ There is at least one other possible reason which has not, I think, been described. It is that in Hyperion Keats may have expressed through the narrative a philosophical problem which he could not solve. Unable to solve the problem, he was unable to complete the action.

To present this possible reason why Keats did not finish Hyperion, it is necessary to begin with the meaning. The most common view of Hyperion is that the basic meaning of the poem has to do with the gradual bettering of the world through the activity of some principle of beauty.⁵ At least in its general direction this interpretation is probably right, for Oceanus' crucial speech (II, 167-243) clearly suggests a notion of cosmic process working out ever nobler designs, and this speech is followed by the confirming address of Clymene (II, 252-299), who has heard in the calling of Apollo's name a concrete realization of the principle which Oceanus has just given.

Hyperion is not the first document by Keats in which the idea is stated; we also have it in the letter of 3 May 1818 to John Hamilton Reynolds, the Mansion of Life letter, in which Keats expresses a notion first of the gradual advancement of a single intellect through successive stages and then goes on to assert that there has been in England a “general and gregarious advance of intellect,” as a result of which Wordsworth stands higher than Milton.⁶ Not only, he appears to say, do men advance individually, but together they improve so as to constitute a “general” betterment of the whole world. Keats deals quite explicitly with this point, asking what conclusions are to be drawn from Wordsworth's intellectual superiority to Milton (though he was not more highly endowed) and answering: “O many things—It proves there is really 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.”⁷

This letter and the speech of Oceanus are clear and emphatic: in 1818, at least, Keats believed that the world evolves toward better conditions. This belief did not attain to Godwinian complacence, however. We have as evidence Keats' rather slighting reference to Dilke as “a Godwin perfectibil[it]y Man,”⁸ and there is also the vision of “an eternal fierce destruction” in the verse “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds.” In the journal letter of 14 February-3 May 1819, written when Keats was finishing as much of Hyperion as he was ever to compose, he speaks of “a World of Pains and troubles” which disciplines the heart.⁹ Keats' perception of evil and suffering is not inconsistent with his belief in some evolutionary scheme of things, but it does qualify that belief. He seems to have thought that even though the world improves, it has a long way to go and much evil to overcome before it attains a state that will nourish human happiness.

Probably that is what most of us think. And indeed, it is the basis, if ever scholars and men generally try to justify their work, for that justification. The world, we incline to believe in our happier moments, progresses, but still there is much to be done, and so we feel obliged to hasten and strengthen the progress. Thus it is that we defend humanitarian endeavor: good overcomes evil, and men can help.

But an entirely different inference can be drawn from the belief that the world improves. If betterment comes about because of some evolutionary principle inherent in the world—and Oceanus' speech in Hyperion and the Mansion of Life letter indicate that to be Keats' belief—then it may be concluded that improvement is necessary and that we live in a determined universe. And in a universe that is determined—whether toward good or evil does not affect the matter—what place is there for individual purpose and effort?

For Christians who believe that the world progresses the problem may not exist, for they hold that betterment comes about as the result of the will of a personal God abetted by the acts of men who love and obey Him. But Keats was not a dogmatic Christian, and although he was not strictly a scoffer except perhaps now and then at Hunt's instigation, he did not have when he wrote Hyperion the sort of belief which would have permitted him to adopt a Christian view of this question. And so, believing as he did that the world progresses toward better things according to some inherent, and therefore determining, principle, he would have had to work out for himself some resolution of the problem of universal fate and individual will.

There are some indications that Keats saw—or perhaps sensed—this problem when he wrote Hyperion and that his consciousness of it works into the poem. The first such indication, perhaps, is the letter that he wrote to Haydon suggesting that Hyperion would make a better subject for illustration than Endymion:

… one great contrast between them will be—that the Hero of the written tale [Endymion] being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstances; whereas the Apollo in Hyperion being a foreseeing God will shape his actions like one.¹⁰

Endymion had been molded, Keats says, by circumstance, but Apollo will be aggressive; he will work effects upon a world which, in Hyperion, itself tends inherently to progress.

When Keats first had Hyperion in mind, then, it seems that he intended to make Apollo a master and not a subject of the world. In the hundred thirty-five lines (all of the third book) which deal with Apollo Keats did not fulfill this aim. And in the light of his description of the Titans it appears that Keats did not fulfill his aim with Apollo because he could not, because he was not able to work through the philosophic problem involved. The description of the Titans in their council shows that, much as they try to assert themselves, still they cannot prevail against the forces inherent in nature. When Saturn asks why the great primeval gods

Should cower beneath what, in comparison,
Is untremendous might,

(II, 154-155)

we are apparently to take seriously his estimate of the Olympians' strength, for Keats refers to a later attack of the Titans which forced the Olympians to disguise themselves in the shape of animals.¹¹ Yet Iapetus, Creus, Enceladus, and Hyperion are all pictures of futility.

Of course Oceanus' explanation of nature's law of progress toward better and more beautiful things interprets the Titans' powerlessness to a degree. But one crucial question it leaves unanswered: What are benevolently disposed persons (like the Titans) to do in a world which is determined toward the good? Keats leaves no doubt at all that the Titans are benevolent; even the fierce Enceladus grieves most of all for the serenity which the revolt of the Olympians has destroyed. Saturn's lament for his lost dominance is an expression of almost perfect love and goodness.

                                                            … I am smothered up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonition to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above men's harvesting,
And all those acts which Deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.

(I, 106-112)

He predicts ultimate victory for the Titans (I, 126-134), and he asks

                                                            Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to naught?

(I, 142-144)

Yet the reader sees in this momentary optimism only a bitter irony, and later at the council of the Titans there is nothing but despair.

At his first appearance Hyperion is impatient and anxious because of his forebodings. He rushes to the chariot of the sun to drive it through the sky, but the fixed order of nature prevents him:

He might not:—No, though a primeval God:
The sacred seasons might not be disturb'd.

(I, 292-293)

A few lines later, Coelus, Hyperion's father, whispers encouragement to him. Coelus admits himself powerless to do anything, but he says to Hyperion:

But thou canst.—Be thou therefore in the van
Of circumstance.

(I, 343-344)

Yet even as Coelus speaks, the sky mocks his words with its imperturbable stillness:

And still they were the same bright, patient stars.

(I, 353)

This, it seems, is as far as Keats could go early in 1819. In a fated universe the man who yearns for good must await the unfolding of world processes to which he can add nothing. Apparently when Keats conceived Hyperion and began work on it he had hoped really to resolve the metaphysical and moral problems inherent in his theme, for at the outset of his argument Oceanus promises “much comfort will I give.” (II, 179) Yet even the deep-thinking Oceanus can offer only sorrow. He sees his supplanter Neptune and says:

I saw him on the calmed waters scud,
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes,
That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewell
To all my empire. …

(II, 236-239)

In Hyperion Keats' vision of life is somber. Keats feels no resignation, for he knows of nothing that can be done about evil; there is only dejection. Hyperion, I think, expresses not only Keats' grief as he watched by Tom's deathbed; it sorrowfully describes a world which evolves to its predestined end without any account of Tom's or anyone's suffering.¹²

Notes

1. Clarence D. Thorpe, ed. John Keats. Complete Poems and Selected Letters (New York, 1935), p. 309.

2. Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After Fame (London, 1917), p. 435.

3. Martha Hale Shackford, “Hyperion,” SP [Studies in Philology], XXII (January, 1925), 48-60.

4. John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare (London, 1926), pp. 82-83. “For the first Hyperion was, as I have said, essentially the poem of Apollo, the poem in which Keats was to reveal the secret of the poetic nature. When he had finished it he had told all he knew of that nature, which was his own; he could tell no more because he knew no more. Three months later he did know more, because his own life had taught him more; and he was impelled to add that knowledge to his poem.

5. E. g., Shackford, 58. “Meditation on this passage [Hyperion, II, 212 ff.] must persuade any one that Keats had grasped the principle that is the foundation of all liberal views,—the belief that there is, through all the sin and sorrow and accident of life, a determining purpose, a forward progress, a developing perfection. This advance is due to an inherent order in the universe, a cosmic harmony:

                                                                                             … 'tis the eternal law
   That first in beauty should be first in might.

   See also Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Poems of John Keats, 5th ed. (London, 1961), xli; Claude Lee Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, II (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1936), 503 ff.; Edward B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York, 1941), p. 142, who makes a specific application to poetry of the idea of progress; Kenneth Muir, “The Meaning of ‘Hyperion’” in John Keats: A Re-assessment ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, 1958), p. 109.

6. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Hollins (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), I, 281 (hereafter referred to as Letters).

7. Letters, I, 282.

8. Letters, I, 397.

9. Letters, II, 102.

10. Letters, I, 207.

11. Hyperion, II, lines 70-72.

12. Murry disagrees with this assessment. In Keats and Shakespeare (p. 85) he writes: “There is no sadder poem in English than Hyperion; but its sadness is not the icy chill of intellectual despair, but the warm, rich, still sadness of a suffering heart determined to control its pain.” Murry seems to find in the poem only Keats' response to Tom's illness and death, not the despondent reflections to which I think he was led.