SOURCE: Plasa, Carl. “Revision and Repression in Keats's Hyperion: ‘Pure Creations of the Poets Brain.’” Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 117-46.

[In the following essay, Plasa discusses the relationship between Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Plasa considers Keats's work as a re-envisioning of poetics that attempts to repress the Miltonic past.]

a poet's stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being, must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish, as a poet.

Harold Bloom

language, for the individual consciousness, lies in the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes ‘one's own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.

Mikhail Bakhtin

I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me.

Keats¹

In a well-known letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818 Keats sets forth an idealized vision of his own poethood that has become canonical. The “poetical Character” with which Keats explicitly associates himself “is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing” (Letters, i, 386-87). Adopting such a stance, the negatively capable or self-effacing poet secures his difference from the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone.” Yet the opposition between the “camelion Poet” and those practitioners of the “egotistical sublime” (who in the end include Milton even more than Wordsworth) is at the same time a projection of conflicts or tensions pervading Keats's own writing. One manifestation of the alter ego belonging to the Keatsian poet who purports to “ha[ve] no Identity” (Letters, i, 387) occurs in a later letter to John Hamilton Reynolds of 24 August 1819:

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world; the Paradise Lost becomes a greater wonder—The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect; the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinancy … My own being which I know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the Shape of Man and women that inhabit a kingdom. The Soul is a world of itself and has enough to do in its own home—Those whom I know already and who have grown as it were a part of myself I could not do without: but for the rest of Mankind they are as much a dream to me as Miltons Hierarchies.

(Letters, ii, 146)

For Keats to represent the thought of surpassing Milton in these terms is ironic because the terms are themselves Miltonically derived. Keats's swelling heart echoes Satan's, as the latter revives to the sight of his fallen comrades after their regrouping: “And now his heart / Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength / Glories.”² Yet it is more than just the language of Keats's letter that is Miltonic here. The identification with Satan indicates that Keats's poetic ambitions entail not only a wish simply to outdo Milton but also, more fundamentally, the desire to gain autonomy from him, since Satan's archetypal claim is that he is “self-begot, self-raised / By [his] own quickening power” (PL v, 860-61). As readers of Paradise Lost since Blake have recognized, Satan in turn embodies Milton's drive toward imaginative self-origination: the poet of Paradise Lost steps outside of time—literary and historical alike—pursuing “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (PL i, 16). To (con)figure or conduct his relations with earlier poets—whether Milton or Wordsworth—according to a Satanic/Miltonic model is thus for Keats to be caught in a paradoxical dilemma. The quest for a poetic stance in which the “Soul is a world of itself” is necessarily compromised and undercut because such a stance has already been arrogated to himself by another, the poet of Paradise Lost. Keats's post-Miltonic station dissolves the search for an “egotistical sublime” of one's own into the spectacular bathos of repetition and unoriginality. The terse recognition of September 1819, cited as this essay's third epigraph, usefully figures the ironic reversal of self-creation into self-destruction.

The problematic nature of poetic autonomy after Milton causes it to become a source of ambivalence, desired and rejected at once. The signs of such ambivalence are inscribed with particular complexity in Keats's Hyperion, largely composed—and abandoned—during the period between which the letters to Woodhouse and Reynolds were themselves written.³ In this poem Keats strives to develop a strategy for negotiating the conflicts resulting from the post-Miltonic assumption of an autonomous poethood. This is evidenced most obviously in Hyperion's status as a revisionary text, a rewriting of Paradise Lost.⁴ Keats appropriates the Miltonic dramas of “impious war in heaven and battle proud” (PL i, 43) and indirectly recasts them, through his poem's myth of theogonic succession, into a prospective allegory of his own imaginative genesis-through-transcendence of the earlier poet. The language of the Miltonic other is emphatically subjectivized, even as it is solely through that language that the Keatsian self becomes its own theme. Such a balanced interplay of self-reflection and self-effacement symptomatizes and resolves the internal conflicts which are part of Keats's post-Miltonic burden.

As a way of circumventing the problematic of autonomy, the revisionary operations of Hyperion align Keats's text less with the Satan of Paradise Lost i or v, than with the figure as he appears elsewhere in Milton's poem:

Like a black mist low creeping, he held on
His midnight search, where soonest he might find
The serpent: him fast sleeping soon he found
In labyrinth of many a round self rolled,
His head the midst, well stored with subtle wiles:
Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den,
Nor nocent yet, but on the grassy herb
Fearless unfeared he slept: in at his mouth
The devil entered, and his brutal sense,
In heart or head, possessing soon inspired
With act intelligential; but his sleep
Disturbed not, waiting close the approach of morn.

(PL ix, 180-91)

There are three points of comparison between Satan's actions here and Hyperion's revisionary poetics. First, just as Satan's strategy depends upon resemblances between himself and the serpent, with its “head … well stored with subtle wiles,” so it is the mutual concern of Milton's text and Keats's with issues of usurpation which opens up the former to reinscription. Secondly, Satan's actions involve a certain self-diminishment (they are a “foul descent!” he tells us, PL ix, 163). This is paralleled in turn in the loss or ascesis of imaginative autonomy necessarily imposed upon Keats by the demands of his poem/project. Finally, what Satan is doing, at this juncture, constitutes an insinuation of self into other whose consequence is the endowment of that other, the serpent, with a language turned, crucially, toward the insinuator's purposes, the prosecution of his “dark intent.” For it is primarily Satan's linguistic power which leads Eve on toward her Fall: “He ended, and his words replete with guile / Into her heart too easy entrance won” (PL ix, 162, 733-34). Such a pattern is rehearsed by Hyperion, as Keats enters into Milton's poem and infuses it with another meaning, repossessing or reinspiring the earlier text as a medium through which to pose the questions of his own poetic incumbency.⁵

The operations of poetic revision in Hyperion can be formulated as much in Bakhtinian as Miltonic terms, suggesting parallels, as they do, with Bakhtin's notion of “dialogism.” For Bakhtin, language is not

a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.⁶

Despite being preoccupied with prior meanings, “the intentions of others,” language is open equally to displacement and reinscription. In the context of Hyperion's relation to Paradise Lost “ever newer ways to mean”⁷ are produced through the Keatsian appropriation/adaptation of his interlocutor's “word” to self-serving and revisionary ends.

Keats's central problem in Hyperion arises from the contradiction between its very status as a revisionary text and the nature of the drama within the poem that it revises. It is under the strain of the split or disjunction between Hyperion's performative and constative levels—“doing” and “writing” to use the terms of the letter to Reynolds—that Keats's text finally fragments. Revision bespeaks and enacts continuity, a Keats working against but also with—or within—Milton. Yet the narrative reworked in Hyperion, in the displaced classical form of the struggle between Titans and Olympians, is predicated upon the disruption of continuity—the Falls of Satan, Adam and Eve and the former's yearning for autonomy. Conflict between Hyperion's revisionary and narrative dimensions reaches crisis in its third book, traditionally accorded only a marginal role in the poem by Keats's critical readers.⁸ Here Keats gets enmeshed in his own agonistic fiction. In spite of himself, he comes to effect a repression of the past which is not only as radical as that sought by Apollo, the poem's hero, but also directly opposed, moreover, to the dialogical gravitations of Hyperion's first two books.⁹

The movement from a self-consciously sustained dialogue with the Miltonic past to an attempted repression of it realigns Keats with the Satan of Paradise Lost v—not the self-insinuator but the radical self-fashioner:

That we were formed then say'st thou? And the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learned: who
                    saw
When this creation was? Remember'st thou
Thy making, while the maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power, when fatal course
Had circled his full orb, the birth mature
Of this our native heaven, ethereal sons.
Our puissance is our own, our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal.

(v, 853-66)

From a theoretical perspective, the movement from dialogue to repression can be figured as a shift from the Bakhtinian paradigm to that of Harold Bloom. For Bloom the powerful forgetting of origins performed by Satan constitutes just the goal toward which the poet must labor: “All quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment, meaning all romanticisms whatsoever,” Bloom asserts, “are quests to re-beget one's own self, to become one's own Great Original.”¹⁰ In these terms Hyperion is less a struggle between Keats and Milton than a dramatization of the warring stances which the later poet adopts toward poetic autonomy and the literary past alike.

I

In one of his annotations to Paradise Lost Keats declares that “the management of this Poem is Apollonian.”¹¹ The “Apollonian” dimension of Milton's text consists, for Keats, in the inexorability with which the earlier poet defines, unfolds and finally realizes his “great argument” (PL i, 24). By the same token, Keats's poetic design in Hyperion could hardly be, like Saturn's fellow “Gods,” more “shaped and palpable” (ii, 153), self-consciously working to transmute the ostentatious structures of Paradise Lost into a medium through which to refract his on relation to Milton. Yet no sooner does Keats's text commence than it becomes disfigured by contradictions which suggest a certain unease with regard to its own requirements—the transpositional writing of the allegory of Milton's poetic Fall in the mythic idiom of the Olympians' usurpation of the Titans:

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 about 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
Spreading a shade; the naiad ‘mid her reeds
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.

(i, 1-14)

Despite Saturn's mortalizing Fall, Keats's text repeatedly stresses his god's distance from the signs that ordinarily denote a subjugation to the temporal. He is “Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, / Far from the fiery moon, and eve's one star,” as from the “life” of a “summer's day.” Saturn's location is an enigmatic and equivocal one—in and out of time at once. The implication is of a poet strangely at odds with his own project. It is as if Keats were proleptically engaged, at the constative level, in a resistance to, or disavowal of the impulses toward discontinuity and rupture to which he himself yields in book three.

Such impulses are integral to any bid for autonomy, poetic or otherwise. As such, they can be seen to meet additional resistance and disavowal at the beginning of Hyperion since it is precisely the possibility of autonomy which, by means of allusion, that beginning negates:

                                                            Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed,
While his bowed head seemed listening to the earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

(i, 17-21)

These lines recall the passage already cited from Paradise Lost v, in which Satan represents himself in terms of a radical self-origination, denying his status as the “work of secondary hands.” Yet it is through such hands—those of the revisionary poet—that the Sublime of self-origination is here reworked and unravelled. Satan's “quickening power” becomes an arrested impotence in Hyperion; the “right hand” whose “puissance” rejects God's “golden sceptre” (PL v, 886), is refashioned as Saturn's, passively “Unsceptred.” In a final intertextual transaction, Satan's self-promotion as the “birth mature” of a “native heaven” is reversed in the figuration of Saturn “listening to the earth, / His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.” Satan's Fall thus extends beyond the perimeters of Milton's heaven, halted only by his re-emergence in the parodically diminished shape of Saturn. Neither Milton nor his text eludes this process. Insofar as Satan's flagrant repression of origins constitutes a figuring forth of Milton's own imaginative desires, the subversion of the one is also that of the other, the Milton who is most truly, if covertly, Satan's “equal.”

Keats's defensiveness toward the elements of strife and conflict presupposed by his poem's narrative design (“sad feud … and rebellion / Of son against his sire” [i, 321-22]) is centrally embodied in the threshold-figure of Hyperion himself who, significantly, gives the poem its title, retains “His sovereignty, and rule, and majesty” (i, 165) and remains (even at ii, 344) “still … undisgraced.” As if in subtle anticipatory dispute with Woodhouse's forecast that “The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,”¹² the earlier figure is in fact represented by the text as self-displacing: “standing fierce beneath he stamped his foot, / And from the basements deep to the high towers / Jarred his own golden region” (i, 222-24; emphasis added). Analogously, at ii, 372-73 Hyperion is “a vast shade / In midst of his own brightness.”

Woodhouse goes on to speculate that for Keats to have continued with the poem would have involved him in the representation of “other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome,” adding that, “In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain.”¹³ As such, he suggests precisely why Hyperion cannot but be a fragment: to step beyond its broken frame draws Keats into the very mode of purely subjective imagining against which his poem sets itself in the first place. The revisionary insinuations of Hyperion's form—sustaining relations with the past—constitute a defence against some such plunge into the voids of an autonomous creativity. Such a defence is evident, within the text, in the poem's recurrent disruptions of the modalities of agonism, conflict, discontinuity—“gods thrown down” (i, 127)—which it inherits from Milton. Given, however, the eventual convulsion of Keats's text in and by the very agonism which provides its allegorical structure, such disruptions can ultimately only amount, however, to little more than a series of misdirected prophylaxes.

The self-curtailment upon which Keats's revisionary insinuations are predicated in turn brings about a loss within the earlier text. Keats's detour through the language of the other results in a diminished return to the self, while simultaneously causing that language to be set adrift from its own originating ground.

The shift, in other words, is from influence to revision, self-dispossession by the past to Bakhtinian repossession and rearticulation of it in the present. As suggested already, this process does not provide an exhaustive model for the interplay between Keats's text and Milton's. It is, nonetheless, one which Hyperion both allegorizes within itself and also carries out in relation to another Miltonic text, “Lycidas.” The allegorical inscription occurs at i, 269-83:

The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode
Each day from east to west the heaven through,
Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds;
Not therefore veilèd quite, blindfold, and hid,
But ever and anon the glancing spheres,
Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure,
Glowed through, and wrought upon the muffling dark
Sweet-shapèd lightnings from the nadir deep
Up to the zenith—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.

Though the stars in this passage are “Not … veilèd quite,” the influence which traditionally flows from them manifests itself not as an influx of power, but as writing, lightnings “wrought upon the muffling dark” (emphasis added).¹⁴ The textualizing of influence—“hieroglyphics old”—subsequently exorcises it, “their import gone, / Their wisdom long since fled,” producing a language no longer bound to the moment of its genesis but open to endless reinscription.¹⁵

As is the case with Hyperion's opening tableau, the concern of Keats's reinscription of “Lycidas” (in passages immediately before and after the lines cited above) is with the waning of the notion of a discontinuous beginning. This is figured in Hyperion's struggle to arouse the dawn prior to its naturally appointed hour. The process commences at i, 263:

                                                                                                              Released, he fled
To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours
Before the dawn in season due should blush,
He breathed fierce breath against the sleepy portals.

(i, 263-66)

It is finally relinquished at i, 295:

Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne
And bid the day begin, if but for change.
He might not. No, though a primeval God,
The sacred seasons might not be disturbed.
Therefore the operations of the dawn
Stayed in their birth, even as here 'tis told.

(i, 290-95)

If the flight toward the “eastern gates” is concurrent with a shift in Hyperion's revisionary milieu, from Paradise Lost to “Lycidas,” this is not surprising because “Lycidas” is paradigmatic in Milton of precisely that preemptive gesture of poetic self-origination which is in Keats no longer extant:

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime.

(lines 1-8)

Milton meets one discontinuity with another, disrupting the correspondence between the rhythms of nature and imagination in an act of poetic self-institution which is as violent as the death, “ere his prime,” of Edward King, the poem's elegiac object, mythologized as Lycidas. Yet the débâcle of Hyperion's failed self-dawning is Keats's resource. The “change” sought at a narrative level is effected in revisionary terms, as Keats's poem operates retrospectively upon Milton's to produce a counter-violation to the one enacted in and by the latter. “Lycidas” becomes the ground of its own displacement, its language set against itself in the refigurative shift from earliness to timeliness.

In this way Milton's text might be said to survive itself, passing into the revisionary afterlife provided for it by Keats's. Such a survival is an ironic one, however, as Hyperion transforms the earlier text into a setting for the demise of the very model of poetic self-begetting which that text had brought to life:

And the bright Titan, frenzied with new woes,
Unused to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretched himself in grief and radiance faint.

(i, 299-304)

What precipitates Hyperion's grief is the dying-out of the Miltonic swain within himself. The aspiration toward autonomy—the “sudden blaze” of “Lycidas,” line 74—is virtually dispersed in the late and levelling recognition (figured in Keats's Titan, deathly and supine and sliding from “bright” to “faint”) that such autonomy is no longer accessible to the poet who writes in its wake. For Keats to revive the poetics whose death Hyperion lives would merely entail his own dying into the life of another, losing autonomy in finding it. Hyperion itself seeks to circumvent this dilemma by incorporating rather than refusing the past. Just as Hyperion is forced to accommodate his “spirit” to the “new woes” of a temporalized existence, so Keats's text subjects the letter of Milton's text (whether “Lycidas” or Paradise Lost) to a process that makes it a medium through which the relation between the two poets may be articulated. The irony is that in Hyperion's third book Keats reanimates the impulses whose death he had both tolled and “told” in the narrative of Hyperion's failure to precipitate the dawn. This shift indeed implicates him in the precocities of Miltonic self-assertion dramatized in “Lycidas.” In book i, however, such a warping of revisionary intent is registered only as a certain division toward the prospect of poetic earliness: if Hyperion fails to hasten the “operations of the dawn” it is not through any reluctance on the part of the sun, his “dazzling globe” (i, 288), whose “wings, / Ever exalted at the God's approach” are “Eager to sail their orb” (i, 284-85, 297).

II

One aspect of the signs of disaster that beset Hyperion is their lack of precedent:

                                                                                                    sometimes eagle's wings,
Unseen before by gods or wondering men,
Darkened the place, and neighing steeds were heard,
Not heard before by gods or wondering men.

(i, 182-85)

To complement their premonitory status, these signs have no recognizable past. Yet their radical newness is strikingly offset by the verbal and syntactic repetitions which characterize the representation of them. The questioning of signification by form is symptomatic of Hyperion's attempted marring of the elements of its own agonistic design (in this instance, discontinuity) noted earlier. Such a marring is accompanied by a masking of that same design. The most sustained occurence of this is Oceanus's speech (ii, 173-243), with its characteristically organicist representation of historical and, by implication, poetic relations alike. But just as Hyperion's agonistic structures are unsettled in the course of their unfolding, so the assertion of continuity in this speech is equally self-destabilizing: the language by which Keats's poem seeks to obscure those structures at the same time undermines the labor of occultation.

The voice of Keats's “God of the Sea” is not a “bellows unto ire” (ii, 167, 176), as such opposing the stance of the militant Enceladus, “hurling mountains in that second war” (ii, 70). Instead it counsels a yielding to the historical processes which have resulted in the Titans' displacement by the Olympians: “as thou wast not the first of powers, / So art thou not the last; it cannot be. / Thou art not the beginning nor the end” (ii, 188-90). In compensation for the Titans' predicament Oceanus goes on to offer a knowledge whose “balm” (ii, 243) consists in the ability to apprehend the pattern of permanent change which informs the passage of history: “to bear all naked truths, / And to envisage circumstance, all calm, / That is the top of sovereignty” (ii, 203-5). To thus “envisage circumstance” is to recognize, and so master, the arbitrariness of its peripetias, one of which the Titans suffer. In these terms Oceanus parallels Keats's observations, on “disinterestedness of Mind,” made in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February-May 1819:

Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events—while we are laughing it sprouts … and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck—Even so we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words.

(Letters, ii, 79)

Yet in Hyperion mastery gained at one level is lost at another, that of language. On the one hand Oceanus claims that history is simply self-elaborating, as devoid of agency as nature itself: “We fall by course of Nature's law, not force / Of thunder, or of Jove” (ii, 181-82). Correlatively, the orientation of past to present which leaves the Titans “O'erwhelm'd, and spurned, and battered” (ii, 156) is transfigured into an acquiescent and organicist continuity:

                                                                                Say, doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,
And feedeth still, more comely than itself?
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?

(ii, 217-20)

Against this, however, the “eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might” (ii, 228-29) periodically reconstitutes itself—despite Oceanus and Keats alike—in terms of Achillean dispossession, “on our heels a fresh perfection treads, / A power more strong in beauty,” and genealogical strife, “another race may drive / Our conquerors to mourn as we do now” (ii, 212-13, 230-31). The figurative tensions—between a naturalistic emphasis on sustenance and growth and a language of usurpation and hierarchy—indicate a “Quarrel” within the representation of historical change itself. The opposition between Oceanus and Enceladus merely dramatizes the linguistic conflicts by which the former is unmastered.

Such conflicts accord in turn with the tensions informing Keats's poethood. The figuration of historical relations in terms of continuity is congruent with the Keatsian desire to incorporate and transfigure the language of the Miltonic past in the present of his own later writing. Yet the disruption of this figuration correlates to and enacts that counter-imperative which Keats seems unable to expel from himself—to assert the self against the past in a transcendent gesture of disarticulation and autonomy. The friction between these antithetical stances is perhaps most concisely inscribed in the clashing idioms of Saturn's questionings: “Who had power / To make me desolate? Whence came the strength? / How was it nurtured to such bursting forth?” (i, 102-4, emphasis added).

The rhetorical dispute which Hyperion carries on within itself reveals an important parallel between Saturn and Oceanus. Despite its having “seemed strangled in [his] nervous grasp” Saturn is unable to control his “fate” (i, 105), just as Oceanus's language strays beyond the realm of his influence over it. That language partakes of the randomness of Keats's cloudlike “Circumstances”: the drive to gather in its meanings beneath the shelter of a determinate purpose is frustrated by the recurrent outburst (or cloudburst) of unsummoned effects. The parallel between the play of language and that of circumstance is predictable because it is indeed suggested by the figurative correspondences which Keats's texts—poetic and epistolary—establish with one another. As indicated by its reformulation in the letter to George and Georgiana Keats, to “envisage circumstance, all calm” entails a mastery gained precisely through acknowledgement of the unmasterable. As the “top of sovereignty,” this is only one step on from poetic accomplishments, as in the letter to Reynolds cited at the beginning of this essay, in which “fine writing” is considered to be “next to fine doing the top thing in the world.” Or again in a related letter to Benjamin Bailey written slightly earlier:

I am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher) a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the world—Shakspeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me.

(Letters, ii, 139)

The link which Keats's language sets up between different modes of mastery (circumstantial and textual) helps to illuminate the nature of “fine writing.” Achieved through “diligence,” it is to be esteemed precisely to the extent that it is finite, exempt from the reversals of intent which cloud Oceanus's speech. Perhaps this is why a “fine writer” is such a “genuine Being”—always meaning what he says, saying what he means? Yet such a poetic model is unsettled in the moment of its formulation. We can only wonder at the anomalous collocation of Shakespeare and Milton as examples of the “fine writer” since Shakespeare's is for Keats the counter-practice of a “fine excess” (Letters, i, 238), an affluence of signifying potential which debunks and deauthenticates the “Being” that writes.¹⁶

Oceanus's predominantly organicist representation of temporal relations constitutes, on Keats's part, a defensive masking of his own attraction toward a poethood, sublimely lost, like Milton's Satan, to its own eternal moment—“We know no time when we were not as now.” Guardedness toward such possibilities is necessitated by the recognition that to enter into the quest for self-origination is implicitly to prepare the ground for the arrival at an unoriginal destination. The self-ironization in which that quest begins, goes on, and ends could scarcely be more acute.

In Oceanus's speech, the recognition of such ironies is inscribed in the form of an allusive compounding of origins and death occurring during his account of the genealogy of the Titans:

                                                                                The ripe hour came,
And with it light, and light, engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touched
The whole enormous matter into life.
Upon that very hour, our parentage,
The heavens and the earth, were manifest.

(ii, 194-99)

The convoluted spectacle of “light, engendering / Upon its own producer,” recollects Sin's description of her coupling with Satan (from whose head she springs) in the second book of Paradise Lost: “and such joy thou took'st / With me in secret, that my womb conceived / A growing burden” (PL ii, 765-67). Sin is relieved of her “burden” shortly afterward: “but he my inbred enemy / Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart / Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out Death” (PL ii, 785-87). The mode in which “The whole enormous matter” is “forthwith touched / … into life” in Keats, through light's “engendering / Upon its own producer” (“chaos and parental darkness” [ii, 191]) is homologous to the genesis of Death in Paradise Lost: Hyperion's narrative level is ironized by its revisionary relations.

Narrative and revisionary levels are similarly counterpointed in another birth scene, that of Apollo as poet, recorded in Hyperion's third book. The textual split is once again a function of the Keatsian ambivalence toward poetic self-origination:

                                                  ‘Yes,’ said the supreme shape,
‘Thou hast dreamed of me; and awaking up
Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side,
Whose strings touched by thy fingers all the vast
Unwearied ear of the whole universe
Listened in pain and pleasure at the birth
Of such new tuneful wonder. Is't not strange
That thou shouldst weep, so gifted?’

(iii, 61-68)

Apollo's tears are explicable (together with the combination of pain and pleasure universally aroused by his golden touch) if we recognize that Keats's language links this moment of poetic birth with a central scene of transgression in Milton:

          So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate:
Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

(PL ix, 780-84)

Eve's transgression (itself a repetition of Satanic overreaching) is enacted in turn by Adam's:

Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and nature gave a second groan,
Sky loured and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original; while Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill.

(PL ix, 1000-1005)

Through its allusive engagement with these scenes Hyperion inscribes transgression within the moment of Apollo's self-institution as poet: Miltonic “sin / Original” becomes the sin of self-origination.¹⁷ Yet even as Keats's text obliquely signals the constitutively doomed nature of a post-Miltonic quest for origins—it will always issue in poetic death—it is precisely to such a quest that Keats surrenders in Hyperion's third book. Here revision becomes repression and Keats's relation to Milton reconfigures itself according to the very logic his poem had sought initially to evade.

III

he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed and written it down—It has then struck him with astonishment—and seemed rather the production of another person than his own.¹⁸

This is Woodhouse's recollection of one of Keats's observations on the alienation of self from text arising in the wake of composition. The phrase Keats cites (from Hyperion) in order to illustrate his sense of self-dissociation is “white melodious throat” (iii, 81) and seems, as Miriam Allott notes, “an odd choice … for [Keats's] purpose.”¹⁹ It is odder still when we consider that the phrase appears immediately prior to a moment in Hyperion in which language precisely assumes an astonishing otherness to the one who speaks it, in this case Apollo, addressing Mnemosyne, goddess of memory: “‘Mnemosyne! / Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how’” (iii, 82-83). The structure of this encounter—the hysterical eruption of a word in the absence or lapsing of consciousness (“‘I know not how’”)—suggests that it is a re-encounter, a return of the repressed. Yet even as the repressed returns it is being, as it were, sent back. Apollo names his other yet Keats's language works to stress the nonsemantic aspects of the naming: Apollo's throat “Throbbed with the syllables” (iii, 82; emphasis added) and they are physically “on” the tongue. It is as if Keats's text were redoubling Apollo's defences by divesting his re-cognition of its content, leaving us only with the structure of its return.

From this perspective we can see that Keats's reported concern with the difficulty of attributing one's poetry to oneself is in turn more urgently attributable to anxieties with regard to the possibility of attribution per se. If “another person” frequently seems to have produced Keats's poetry, the effect is all the more disturbing because, in the moment to which Keats's comment is metonymically linked, the other is located within the self. The displacement of affect from one textual memory (Apollo's exclamation) to another (the description of his throat) continues the labor of repression that characterizes the scene which it indirectly discloses.

The significance of this is twofold. First, Keats's evasive allusion to a scene which dramatizes the inscription of otherness within the self is symbolic of a desire to erase the memory of Hyperion's third book as such. This is so because in this book, once again, Keats's writing undergoes a curious transformation. This is based on the repression of Milton, whose presence prior to this point had been self-consciously acknowledged, and which, despite its having been subsequently repressed, regathers itself to such an extent that Keats is forced finally to abandon his poem altogether. Such an abandonment is concomitantly prompted by the problem Milton brings with him or connotes—that involving the constraints upon and contradictions within the post-Miltonic quest for an autonomous poethood.

Keats's desired repression of that part of Hyperion in which the repressed threatens its return is significant, secondly, because it is reinforced by his critics. In the poem's third book, it is typically argued, Keats fails to sustain the “more naked and grecian Manner”—the Miltonic promise—of books i and ii as his language reverts to the “sentimental cast” of Endymion (Letters, i, 207). While the stylistic regression is undeniable, the presupposition of an attendant movement from Miltonic to unMiltonic writing functions once again to obscure the repression of the earlier poet. It is not that the interplay with Milton simply dissolves in book iii, but rather that it comes to operate according to a different logic to that which had previously informed it.

At the beginning of the third book it might seem, indeed, that Keats's goal is consciously to assert an independence from Milton and Paradise Lost, the inauguration of his own poetic voice:

Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace,
Amazèd were those Titans utterly.
Oh, leave them, Muse! Oh, leave them to their woes;
For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire;
A solitary sorrow best befits
Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.

(iii, 1-6)

To read these lines in such a way is, however, to miss the sense in which narrative content is qualified by revisionary action: even as Keats offers a gesture of farewell toward Paradise Lost, in the synecdochic reference to “tumults dire,” he does so by means of a repetition of the invocational structures of Milton's text. Paradoxically or ironically using the idiom of the earlier poet as a means of figuring a departure beyond him, this particular passage could be said to form an intratextual allegory of Hyperion as a whole. Appropriating and transfiguring Paradise Lost into a medium through which to allegorize his movement “beyond” Milton, Keats in fact suggests that such a movement is more properly achieved by remaining “within” the earlier poet. In Hyperion the desire of the revisionary Keats is not so much to escape Milton per se as to avoid the performance of the relation between them according to Miltonic criteria—conflict, agonism, strife. To do so would be for Keats indeed to suffer a regression—away from himself. Yet this is precisely what happens, through the attempted repression of Milton, in Hyperion's third book.

The shift in Keats's orientation toward Milton can be discerned by considering another early moment in the third book, together with the texts to which it alludes: “The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars / Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush / Began calm-throated” (iii, 36-38). Nightingale and thrush, here, are figures of poetic voice. The former reincarnates Milton's “wakeful bird” that “Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal note” (PL iii, 38, 39-40). The latter takes us back to an earlier point in Keats, where it emerges as speaker of the sonnet interpolated toward the end of a letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818:

I was led into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness—I have not read any Books—the Morning said I was right—I had no Idea but of the Morning and the Thrush said I was right—seeming to say—

‘O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind;
          Whose eye has seen the Snow clouds hung in Mist
And the black-elm tops 'mong the freezing Stars
To thee the Spring will be a harvest-time—
O thou whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night, when Phoebus was away
To thee the Spring shall be a tripple morn—
O fret not after knowledge—I have none
And yet my song comes native with the warmth
O fret not after knowledge—I have none
And yet the Evening listens—He who saddens
At thought of Idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.’

(Letters, i, 232-33)

Producing its song in the absence of knowledge, the thrush would appear to implement and so validate the policy of a “diligent Indolence” (Letters, i, 231) or quasi-Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” which it is the concern of the letter's earlier sections to elaborate.

From a Bloomian perspective, the nonknowledge upon which poetry is predicated takes the form, more specifically, of a certain denial or repression of (inter)textual origins—necessary to the sustainment of the fiction of one's own originality. Here such a denial is figured in Keats's assertion that he has “not read any Books.” Claims to textual innocence are heavily belied, however, by the passage from Milton (already touched upon above) to which the sonnet alludes:

Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature's works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

(PL iii, 37-50)

Autonomy of poethood is retrospectively transmuted, through the famous caesura—“thoughts, that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers”—into a desire to ground the self, through poetry, in intersubjectivity and exchange. The effect of the grammatical slippage is to suggest that, even for Milton, the attractions of autonomy constitute equally a threat requiring dissipation. Conversely, the obscurity of the location of Milton's “wakeful bird” implies that the “nocturnal note” is dependent upon withdrawal “from the cheerful ways of men.” But where the nightingale “Sings darkling” Milton sees, not so much elegizing lost continuities with nature (“Thus with the year / Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day”) as reproducing them through the visionariness of ultimately self-nourishing thoughts in which, indeed, the human face appears divine. Yet if Milton's lost presences reappear transfigured, what necessarily fails to get through to him is the repressed disingenuousness of the grief for “nature's works,” together with the delight in his own autonomy. Even so, these inscriptions are legible at the level of language: literal blindness comes to constitute a figuring of repression, on the one hand, erasing “knowledge” and excluding “wisdom,” while also allegorizing Milton's nonrecognition of the very figurative ways of his own text, from which he is “Cut off” and “quite shut out” alike.

This brief excursus provides the context through which to read Hyperion iii, 36-38 in greater detail. The abrupt cessation of the nightingale's song would seem to provide another sign of Keats's liberation from the lures of the Miltonic autonomy with which, in Paradise Lost, the nightingale is identified. However, the nightingale's silence is filled by a song whose “calm-throated”/unfretting singer himself functions as a Keatsian double or stand-in for the kind of autonomous poethood which the text appears at first to have left behind. The figurative exchange/usurpation of voices at this point in Hyperion—Keats's for Milton's—allegorizes the poem's desired movement from revision to repression of the past, dialogue to discontinuity.

This allegorization, in which the text restates, or restages, its own action within itself, is developed in Apollo's encounter with Mnemosyne:

With solemn step an awful Goddess came,
And there was purport in her looks for him,
Which he with eager guess began to read
Perplexed.

(iii, 46-49)

Apollo's memory-figure is in turn, as we have seen, a figure for a memory—Keats's, of the problematic Milton—which is fundamentally repressed in nature. That Mnemosyne indeed fulfills this role can be underlined by recalling that the appearance of Apollo's interlocutor is decidedly uncanny, both anxiously puzzling (Apollo is “Perplexed”) and strangely familiar. The unheimlich is heimlich also:

‘How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?
Or hath that antique mien and robèd from
Moved in these vales invisible till now?
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone
In cool mid-forest; surely I have traced
The rustle of those ample skirts about
These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers
Lift up their heads, as still the whisper passed.
Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before,
And their eternal calm, and all that face,
Or I have dreamed.’

(iii, 50-61)

Coming from afar, “over the unfooted sea,” Mnemosyne has never been away, moving “in these vales invisible till now.” What articulates itself through these tensions is, first, a Keats struggling to maintain the repression of Milton and, secondly, the narrative allegory of the poets' revisionary relation. Apollo's déjà vu answers to Keats's déjà lu, the suspicion that Milton's text, robed in the form of Keats's, is itself moving invisibly beneath the latter's veils.

Milton is thus simultaneously absent/present within the Keatsian encounter between Apollo and Mnemosyne, revealed that is by the very processes which seek to obscure him. It is consequently appropriate that the Miltonic scene specifically revised at this juncture by Hyperion should itself be marked by a play of presence-within-absence. At one level, the Apollo/Mnemosyne relation allegorizes Keats's mediated re-encounter with Milton (and the allegory is the mediation) while, at another level, it recollects Eve's beguilement by Satan, “enclosed / In serpent” (PL ix, 494-95). This interplay needs to be sketched before returning to Hyperion's figuration, within itself, of Keats's relation to Milton.

We can begin to draw together Keats's Mnemosyne and Milton's Satan by noting that both initiate the search for their respective objects, Apollo and Eve, on the basis of a universal rumor. Mnemosyne commences her quest at ii, 29, “straying in the world.” Having crossed the “unfooted sea” she goes on to address Apollo directly, representing herself as:

                                                                                          ‘an ancient Power
Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
Of loveliness new born.’

(iii, 76-79)

Keats's text dissolves the ground beneath the representation of its ostensibly unpaved sea. While Mnemosyne lacks Satan's self-dramatization, her path retraces his, the undertaking:

                                                            with lonely steps to tread
The unfounded deep, and through the void immense
To search with wandering quest a place foretold
Should be, and, by concurring signs, ere now
Created vast and round, a place of bliss
In the purlieus of heaven.

(PL ii, 828-33)

The concurrence of signs, Keats's with Milton's, is manifest in other respects. In her “antique mien and robèd form” Mnemosyne refigures Satan lost in the “surging maze” of his serpentine disguise, itself fluctuating between absence and presence, “now hid, now seen” (PL ix, 499, 436). Satanic self-concealment combines with indirection of approach, “With tract oblique / At first, as one who sought access, but feared / To interrupt, sidelong he works his way” (PL ix, 510-12). Such circuitousness is part of a larger pattern of retarded action, Milton's “guileful tempter” (PL ix, 567) having already gained and lost access to paradise in book iv. In this book, Satan's first sighting of Adam and Eve is announced by Milton at lines 285-88:

                                                                                                                                                      the fiend
Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living creatures new to sight and strange:
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall

and is brought into focus again (at iv, 395-408) by strategies of indirection and disguise. But in what would doubtless be for Satan a painfully inescapable irony, his articulation of the vision of Adam and Eve (PL iv, 358-92) is made secondary to and suspended by Milton's articulation of his own vision (PL iv, 288-355).

Satan's marginally belated status returns us to the parallel with Keats's Mnemosyne, addressing Apollo, to whom she has been similarly present almost from the first:

                                                                                                                        ‘Explain thy griefs
To one who in this lonely isle hath been
The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life,
From the young day when first thy infant hand
Plucked witless the weak flowers.’

(iii, 70-74)

Unwittingly crossing his own flowers of language with Milton's, Keats breeds a curious hybrid. In response to the allegorical transformation we have been charting (Satan into Mnemosyne) Apollo becomes a male Eve, culling the blooms she nurtures:

                                                                                                    them she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while,
Her self, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.

(PL ix, 430-33)

The precision with which the Apollo/Mnemosyne relation constitutes a revision of that between Milton's Eve and Satan can be underscored by noting that Apollo, having “left his mother fair / And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower,” and standing “Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale” (iii, 31-32, 35), is in as vulnerable a position as the ostensibly embowered Eve, his other twin: “Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood, / Half spied, so thick the roses bushing round / About her glowed” (PL ix, 425-27) and “from her best prop so far” (emphasis added).

At this point, the other allegory at play within the Apollo/Mnemosyne relation can be reintroduced—that concerning Hyperion's inscription within itself of Keats's repressed encounter with Milton. It might seem, in this context, that there is a difference between narrative and revisionary relations. Apollo appears to name his interlocutor while Keats cannot. Indeed in the former's exclamation, “‘Mnemosyne! / Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how,’” Keats utters a malapropism which chokes back the name of Milton. As suggested earlier, however, Keats's text works to undo the moment of Apollonian recognition by accenting the materiality rather than the content of the name.

The difference between Apollo and Keats, recognition and repression, can be shown to dissolve in other respects. Mnemosyne's presence, with its “antique mien and robèd form,” its “vestments sweeping o'er / The fallen leaves” and “ample skirts,” is as densely mediated for Apollo as is Milton's for Keats. Nor are the veils lifted when they seem to be. Apollo “identifies” Mnemosyne by scanning her face, yet that face is itself a mediation, a text, a something woven: “he with eager guess began to read / Perplexed,” “‘Yet I can read / A wondrous lesson in thy silent face’” (iii, 111-12). Apollo retrieves his memory only for it to continue to escape him. Hyperion's recognition scene is precisely that—a scene—as Keats unconsciously sweeps his own textual leaves more firmly over Milton's in order to obscure the path he is retracing.

It is with regard to Mnemosyne's textual face that Apollonian cognition and Keatsian repression become finally fused. As suggested at iii, 114-16, the “purport” graven into that face is sharply Miltonic: “Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, / Creations and destroyings,” thus returning Keats to the vision of “tumults dire” from which he had initially feinted to depart. But how rigorous a reader is Apollo? He seems barely to engage with the Miltonic text which Mnemosyne brings to mind, not scrutinizing but glossing its perplexities with guesswork, just as the “Knowledge enormous” which he claims to have put on (iii, 113) is derived from an interpretative act so rapid as thoroughly to blur rather than elucidate its object. Conversely, Keats's reading of Milton is far more genuinely baffled by the linkage between self-origination and poetic death, the necessary resolution of self-creations into self-destroyings. Apollo's assertion of a knowledge of his past text is undermined, exposing the evasiveness of his reading-strategies—creations and destroyings, rather than creations as destroyings. Nonetheless, we ourselves can read in such evasiveness the sign of that repression of previous insights by which Keats's writing, in Hyperion's third book, is regulated. Such insights emerge, once again, at the level of language. In the moment of his self-definition, that language simultaneously and accordingly refigures Apollo as a space flooded by a violently Miltonic otherness: “‘Creations and destroyings, all at once / Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, / And deify me’” (iii, 116-18; emphasis added). Keats's god could hardly be more weakly self-possessed, his “Knowledge enormous” merely a trope for an equally monumental Keatsian failure of insight, at this point, into the ironies that unmake the post-Miltonic quest for an autonomous poethood.

In the poem's final stages, Apollo's labor is to bring himself into a new mode of being:

Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs—
Most like the struggle at the gate of death;
Or liker still to one who should take leave
Of pale immortal death, and with a pang
As hot as death's is chill, with fierce convulse
Die into life.

(iii, 124-30)

From one simile to the next (“Most like … / Or liker still”) Keats approaches, without quite reaching, a recognition of the figure with whom his quester is, intertextually, in co-motion. Apollo's liminal struggle resembles nothing so much as the Miltonic confrontation between Satan and Death (another who resists his poet's definitions, PL, ii, 666-70) at the gates of hell:

Whence and what art thou, execrable shape,
That darest, though grim and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated front athwart my way
To yonder gates? Through them I mean to pass,
That be assured, without leave asked of thee:
Retire, or taste thy folly, and learn by proof,
Hell-born, not to contend with spirits of heaven.

(PL ii, 681-87)

Unlike Milton's Satan, who does take leave of death (journeying on to chaos, thence to earth and paradise), Keats's Apollo remains thwarted. This difference is precisely a function of the correspondences between the two figures. For Apollo to give birth to himself, “Die into life” and secure autonomy, is for Keats to become caught in the figuration of the poetic death-in-life which for him defines the condition of a post-Miltonic autonomy. This irony, as we have seen, is articulated by Keats's language: the closer Apollo moves toward an autonomous genesis, the more he comes to recollect another, the self-fathering Satan. At the end of Hyperion Keats contends against his own worst impulse, figured in the Apollonian drive toward self-dawning, and finally extinguished in the poem's mid-sky fragmentation: “Apollo shrieked—and lo! from all his limbs / Celestial …” (iii, 135-36).

We can return by way of conclusion to a passage cited at the beginning of this essay, Paradise Lost ix, 180-91, in which Satan orally enters and possesses the serpent. Keats annotates these lines as follows:

Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement—the unwilling stillness—the ‘waiting close’? Whose head is not dizzy at the possibly [sic] speculations of satan in the serpent prison—no passage of poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.²⁰

The peculiarity of such a response is that it seems markedly to skew the effects of the lines that prompt it. Keats's reading of Milton is both displaced and proleptic, much more pertinent to a passage in the next book of Paradise Lost. Here, following the Fall of Adam and Eve, Satan's manipulation of the serpent is meticulously revenged and reversed by God:

                                                            supplanted down he fell
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom.

(PL x, 513-17)

Satan becomes precisely the prisoner of the form he had previously appropriated to his own design. When Satanic self-insinuation results in such a débâcle, the perils of a revisionary project that resembles it become clear and the hideous miscarriage with which Hyperion ends is made to seem inevitable. Manipulation of the textual other turns into entrapment within it, as Keats's poem irreversibly crosses the gap between Bakhtinian and Bloomian modes, self-insinuation and self-origination, revision and repression.

Notes

1. The epigraphs are taken, respectively, from Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 71; The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 293; and The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), ii, 212. Keats's letters are hereafter cited parenthetically as Letters.

2. Paradise Lost, i. 571-73, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968), p. 495. All citations of Milton's works are from this edition. Subsequent citations of Paradise Lost appear parenthetically in the text as PL, by book and line number.

3. On the dating of Hyperion's composition (Autumn 1818-April 1819) see The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), p. 394. All citations of Hyperion, hereafter parenthetically in the text, by line number, are from this edition.

4. Perhaps still the most provocative—if unswervingly Bloomian—reading of Hyperion from this perspective remains Paul Sherwin, “Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 93 (1978), 383-95. See also Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 145-87; Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 112-42; Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 190-211; and Jonathan Bate, “Keats's Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton,” in Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 321-38.

5. In these terms, Hyperion itself sheds an interestingly revisionary light on the Keatsian self-figuration of the identity-less poet who is “continually in for—and filling some other Body” in the letter to Woodhouse (Letters, i, 387). The “Body” in question is a poetic one—Paradise Lost—the central element, indeed, in the Miltonic corpus. Far from entailing passive loss and effacement, self-insinuation as it occurs at an intertextual level comes thus to seem more like an absorption of the materials of the past into the project of a later writing.

6. The Dialogic Imagination, p. 294.

7. The Dialogic Imagination, p. 346.

8. The marginalizing of Hyperion's third book is typically linked to the sense in which it constitutes a stylistic regression toward Endymion. As Paul Sherwin writes: “In the first two books, where he respects, however guardedly, his continuity with Milton, Keats writes self-consciously, yet powerfully, against the grain. But in Book iii, where he needs to assert himself, the voice we hear, full of inner haltings, is that of Endymion, indicating that he has not progressed at all” (“Dying into Life,” 386). While Hyperion's third book clearly does return to the idioms of Endymion, it needs nonetheless to be read in terms of an engagement with Milton and the Miltonic which is as pervasive as it is in the first two books. The difference is that in book three the nature of the engagement is pivotally transformed from being self-conscious to unconscious/repressed.

9. Such a movement could be said in turn to go against the ideal orientation of Keats's poetry, as defined by Levinson, as a whole: “Keats's relation to the Tradition,” Levinson writes, “is better conceived as dialogic (Bakhtin) than dialectic (Bloom). The poetry does not clear a space for itself by a phallic agon; it opens itself to the Tradition, defining itself as a theater wherein such contests may be eternally and inconclusively staged” (p. 15).

10. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 64.

11. Cited in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 558.

12. Cited in Allott, p. 441.

13. Allott, p. 441.

14. In its literal meaning “influence” is an astrological term for the “supposed flowing from the stars of an ethereal fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men” (OED [Oxford English Dictionary]). It is, in Geoffrey H. Hartman's phrase, “a word which points to the stars.” Hartman goes on, appropriately, to note—in the context of the Book of Genesis—precisely the conversion of the stars from powers to signs figured in the passage from Hyperion. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 114.

15. A useful gloss on these lines is provided by Alan J. Bewell, “The Political Implications of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism, 25 (Summer 1986), 220-29: “Though a sign as sign can achieve a certain kind of permanence,” Bewell writes, “its meaning is less resistant to change or loss. … Since the Rosetta Stone, though discovered … 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” (228).

16. As suggested for example in a letter to Reynolds of 22 November 1817: “One of the three Books I have with me is Shakespear's Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets—they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally—in the intensity of working out conceits” (Letters, i, 188; emphasis added).

17. Hyperion's allusive linkage of originality with transgression occurs also in Keats's letters, during the postmortem conducted over The Fall of Hyperion, whose final abandonment Keats announces in a letter to Reynolds of 21 September 1819 (Letters ii, 167). Considering his recent difficulties Keats goes on in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats of the same month to combine reflections upon the linguistic eccentricities of Paradise Lost with a desire to contain their spread. Though “so fine in itself” Milton's text “should be kept as it is unique—a curiosity, a beautiful and grand Curiosity” because it is a “curruption of our Language” (Letters ii, 212). The strategy of containment would appear, however, to have failed: in the misspelling of “corruption” Keats provides his own, equally curious, version of the pernicious—perhaps even Satanic—textual practices he associates with the earlier poet.

18. Cited in Allott, p. 438.

19. Allott, p. 438.

20. Cited in The Romantics on Milton, ed. Joseph Wittreich, p. 560.