SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “Keats's Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton.” In Romantic Revisions, edited by Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, pp. 321-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Bate discusses the influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Bate focuses on Keats's repeated attempts to compose a more politically progressive, less Miltonic Hyperion.]

One of the most powerful chapters in Walter Jackson Bate's magisterial biography of John Keats is the thirteenth, ‘The Burden of the Mystery: The Emergence of a Modern Poet’.¹ It is there that we are presented with an image of the young Keats grappling with the problem of the inherited literary tradition. Out of Wordsworth's pregnant phrase, as quoted by Keats, ‘The Burden of the Mystery’, grew Jackson Bate's conception of ‘The Burden of the Past’. John Keats was published in 1963; the following year Harold Bloom wrote his essay, ‘Keats and the Embarrassments of Poetic Tradition’, one of the first airings of his theory of influence.² In the early 1970s both Bate and Bloom, having tested their theories on Keats, developed them in more general terms in short but groundbreaking books, The Burden of the Past and The Anxiety of Influence.³ Jackson Bate's study is centrally concerned with the decline of the major poetic genres, while Bloom advances a more personal, explicitly Oedipal, model of literary history, but in each case Milton plays a key role.

The prime symptom of ‘the burden of the past’ is the inability of English poets to write epic after Paradise Lost, that summation and transumption of all previous epic. I use the term ‘transumption’ in John Hollander's sense, with regard to Milton's capacity simultaneously to summon up and to subsume his predecessors: ‘he … transcend[s] the prior allusions, even as he has alluded to them. It is like a summing up of the range of texts for him, tempting us to play with the notion of transumption as if the Latin word were a portmanteau of transcending and summing up’.⁴ Dryden and Pope only managed mock-epic or the translation of Classical epic. The ground of English Romanticism is strewn with the fragments of failed undertakings in epic—one thinks of Blake's incompletion of The Four Zoas, Coleridge's inability to write The Fall of Jerusalem, and pre-eminently Wordsworth's non-publication and restless revision of his epic of the individual mind, the age's boldest attempt to overgo Milton's cosmic theme. Endymion is Keats's experiment in romance; from there he moved on to his endeavour in epic. Hyperion has a more traditional epic theme and structure than any other project by a major Romantic poet: an opening in medias res, a Titanic battle in heaven, the fall of a divinity, the rise of a new god. The original version has a manifestly Miltonic shape, in that its first two books dwell on fallen gods while the third begins in the realm of light. But then it breaks off. Did Keats first revise and then abandon Hyperion because of Milton's overbearing influence?

For Bloom, Milton is the great inhibitor, the strangler of later poetic imaginations: ‘The motto to English poetry since Milton was stated by Keats: “Life to him would be Death to me”’ (Anxiety, p. 32). Keats wrote this apropos of giving up his project to write on the subject of Hyperion;⁵Hyperion has thus become a crucial test-case for interpretations of the Romantic attempt to deal with—in Bloom's special sense, to ‘revise’—Milton.⁶ It will, however, be my argument in this essay that criticism's emphasis on Milton's inhibiting effect has led to an oversimplification, not least in that the model of a development from the more Miltonic poem (Hyperion) to the less Miltonic one (The Fall of Hyperion) ignores the complex sequence of composition from Hyperion (1818) to The Fall of Hyperion (1819) to the published Hyperion (1820). The problem of Milton is only one of a number of problems, most important of which is that of tragedy: Keats's revisions are bound up not only with questions of poetic diction but also with the articulation of a tragic vision in place of a vision of progress for which the most appropriate medium was epic narrative. Furthermore, that movement from epic progress-poem to meditative tragedy has significant political ramifications.

To begin, however, with Milton. Important evidence concerning Keats's reading of Paradise Lost may be gleaned from the underlinings and annotations in his copy of the poem, which is now held at Keats House in Hampstead.⁷ Milton's centrality to the diction of the first Hyperion is apparent even from the famous line with which the poem begins, ‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale’. This locution evokes not only a location—what Keats in his Miltonic marginalia called a ‘stationing’⁸—but also a mood, derived primarily from the word ‘vale’, with its simultaneous suggestion of enclosure and a veil of mourning (‘sadness’ activates the pun). It was Milton who showed Keats how to use this word ‘vale’ with resonance. In a situation analogous to that with which Hyperion begins—we are among the fallen, the giant forms who have been defeated in the war in heaven—Satan rouses his followers:

                                                            or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?

(PL, I, 318-21, final line underscored by Keats)

Beside these lines Keats wrote in his copy of Paradise Lost:

There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The english word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of delphic Abstraction—a beautiful—thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry.

                              Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent Valley & c.

[PL, II, 546-7]

How much of the charm is in the Valley!—

(Wittreich, p. 554)

While the opening of Hyperion is indebted to Paradise Lost in its poetic diction, Keats's annotations reveal that his reading of Milton's vales was revisionary. Contrary to Harold Bloom's kind of revisionism, however, what the force of Keats's rewriting indicates is dependence on a memory, not a forgetting, on a recollection of the precise words and context of the precursor text. For Milton, the point about Satan's question is that the vales of hell are not like those of heaven; the recollection of heaven's vales is used by the devil to provoke his cohorts out of slumber and back into action. Immediately before Satan speaks he is seen walking with ‘uneasy steps / Over the burning marl, not like those steps / On heaven's azure’ (PL, I, 295-7). Milton's ‘not like’ exposes Satan's subsequent ‘as in’ for what it is—a characteristic rhetorical imposture. Keats, however, implies that the sound of ‘vale’ cools hell down and that the vales of both heaven and hell are the product not of Milton the moralist, but of Milton the poet, the maker of beautiful images. Keats has much to say about vales, nothing to say about ‘virtue’, a word which from Milton's point of view is not ironic coming from Satan's mouth. So too with the next mention of vale: as Keats quotes it, in company with ‘mild’, ‘Retreated’ and ‘silent’, it does indeed have a ‘charm’; but Keats's ‘& c.’ conceals the context:

                                                            Others more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of battle; and complain that fate
Free virtue should enthral to force or chance.

(PL, II, 546-51)

This is less than charming: in the infernal epic that they are composing here, the fallen angels are proudly praising their own prowess and are constructing a distorted version of their fall in which they stand for ‘Free virtue’ and God for ‘force or chance’. In each ‘vale’ passage, then, the fallen angels falsely appropriate ‘virtue’. While Milton means the reader to notice this, Keats veils the ethical reading in a mist and concentrates on the pathos and poetic beauty. In annotating Book II, he underlined the whole of the sentence in question with the exception of ‘and complain that fate / Free virtue should enthral to force or chance’; furthermore, he wrote in the margin of how ‘the delicacies of passion’ in the fallen angels are ‘of the most softening and dissolving nature’ (Wittreich, p. 557). This is in keeping with the wholesale revision of the first two books of Paradise Lost in the first two books of Hyperion whereby the reader's sympathy is enlisted for the pathetic fallen gods while the admonitory Miltonic voice is silenced.

Keats made his Paradise Lost annotations in 1818, the year of the first Hyperion. Before considering the revisionary process in detail, it is worth recollecting the chronology of composition. The poem was begun in autumn 1818 and the first attempt abandoned in April 1819. Soon after Tom's death in December 1818, we find Keats writing ‘Just now I took out my poem to go on with it—but … I could not get on’; in March 1819, he is ‘in a sort of qui bono temper, not exactly on the road to an epic poem’; and the following month his friend Richard Woodhouse notes, ‘K. lent me the fragment … abt 900 lines in all … He said he was dissatisfied … and should not complete it.’⁹ A few months later, in July 1819, he began a reconstruction, but on 21 September 1819 he wrote to J. H. Reynolds, ‘I have given up Hyperion’ (i.e. the second version, The Fall of Hyperion). It is here that he blames Milton. The previous month he had twice written of the wonders of Paradise Lost,¹⁰ but now he suggests that he is stultified by it:

I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in artful or rather artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion and put a mark X to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one // to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas imagination I cannot make the distinction—Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation—But I cannot make the division properly. The fact is I must take a walk[.]

(Letters, 2, p. 167)

‘I have given up’ sounds decisive, yet Keats asks Reynolds to go through the first version looking for Miltonisms, presumably with the intention of cutting or altering in the second version such lines as his friend marked with a cross. The need to clear his head with a walk shows that revision is a struggle. On the same day he wrote in his journal-letter to the George Keatses, ‘I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written but i[n] the vein of art—I wish to devote myself to another sensation’ (Letters, 2, p. 212). ‘The vein of art’ suggests that Keats has come to the conclusion that writing Miltonically is not only a struggle but also a questionable departure from life, from immediate sensation. Keats always loved a pun and it is not implausible to hear the several senses of ‘vain’ in ‘vein’.

Whether or not Keats undertook any further work on The Fall after 21 September 1819 is unclear. According to Charles Brown, he was remodelling' contemporaneously with the writing of The Jealousies, which he may have been working on later that autumn.¹¹ What is certain is that in the following year the first version was prepared for publication. It appeared under the title Hyperion. A Fragment in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (published July 1820). In a number of places the published text restored readings of Keats's original holograph manuscript that had been altered in Woodhouse's transcript, which became the printer's copy. Since it is highly probable that Keats made these corrections himself, it is also likely that he was responsible for a number of new readings introduced in the 1820 text.¹² The second unfinished version was not published until 1857, long after Keats's death. His friends preferred the first version, which is probably one reason why he chose it for the 1820 volume. The latter carried a publisher's advertisement:

If any apology be thought necessary for the appearance of the unfinished poem of Hyperion, the publishers beg to state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their particular request, and contrary to the wishes of the author. The poem was intended to have been of equal length with Endymion but the reception of that work discouraged the author proceeding.

But in a presentation copy Keats crossed this out, saying that it was inserted without his knowledge when he was ill, and that it was ‘a lie’ to say that he failed to finish the first Hyperion because of the poor critical reception accorded to Endymion. Clearly, then, there were other reasons for this first discontinuation.

The Miltonic influence is usually taken to be the major one.¹³ The epic tone and structure of the first version is manifest in its division into books; the revised title, The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream, and the new opening section in which the poet has his vision, denote a shift to a structure that bears more resemblance to romance or ‘dream-poem’. Internalization and subjectification separate The Fall off from Milton. Furthermore, it has ‘cantos’ instead of books: Keats had been reading in the Italian classics, especially Dante and Ariosto, over the summer of 1819 and this is the likeliest source of the change in form. Revision to cantos—which Keats had in fact been contemplating even when writing the first Hyperion¹⁴—also suggests a reversion to Spenser, Keats's earliest master, and in particular to the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’, which were such a rich source for the maturing poet who in 1819 was becoming less of an Endymion yearning for transcendence and more of an Oceanus recognizing the necessity of transience.¹⁵

The revised structure was also bound up with the state of contemporary English poetry, where ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’ seemed to be having more success than epics. Most significantly, there was ‘Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment’. The new substance of The Fall, the poet's meeting with Moneta, revises the climax of the first Hyperion, Apollo's assumption of godhead through his reading of Mnemosyne's face. It was with regard to this passage that Keats told his friend Woodhouse: ‘It seemed to come by chance or magic—to be as it were something given to him’ (Keats Circle, 1, p. 129). He is following Coleridge's famous prefatory note to ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him.’¹⁶ Both ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Hyperion are poems centrally concerned with the activity of imagination; each exemplifies what it means by poetry through metaphors of inspiration. The poem is said to be given, not made; instead of being apostrophized or summoned in epic fashion, the Muse is conjured from within by means of ‘a vision in a dream’.

There are, then, numerous indications that whereas in Hyperion Keats is manifestly imitating Milton, in The Fall he is absorbing other models. Yet he nowhere talks about the oppressive Miltonic influence as the reason for his first abandonment. The chronology is as follows: Keats gives up the first version, starts the second, then re-reads Paradise Lost and is struck by its beauties, and finally gives up the second version because of its persistent Miltonics. If Keats did give up the first version because he was unhappy with its poetic diction, the problem perhaps was not so much the Miltonics as a certain return to Endymionese, to luxuriant imagery at the expense of narrative focus, in the third book. In fact, it seems to me that Keats did not know why Hyperion was going wrong the first time. His reasons for stopping work on it were more extrinsic—his health, the difficulty of sustaining a long poem, and, more positively, the discovery of the form that suited him best, the ode. But soon after he took the poem up again in summer 1819, he re-read Milton and then realized how excessively Miltonic it was. In late August he wrote to Reynolds to the effect that ‘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 Obstinacy’ (Letters, 2, p. 146). The pride here—which evinces a characteristic Romantic identification with Milton's Satan, whose ‘heart / Distends with pride’ (PL I, 571-2)—stems from the hope of creating a poem that is a true successor to Paradise Lost; the obstinacy, from refusal to give up on it. But within a month Keats does give up precisely because of the feeling that he is writing as a successor to Milton and is accordingly trapped in a style incompatible with the naturalness and fluidity of diction he had perfected in the odes. All this, however, takes place in the second half of 1819: critics have attached too much weight to the letters of 21 September, assuming that what Keats perceived as the problem then must have been the problem back in April. It is not surprising that Bloom values this late correspondence so highly, given the identification with Satan and the dramatic cry that ‘Life to him would be death to me’, but the processes of composition and revision are never as simple or as single-minded as an ex post facto explanation in a letter might make them appear to be. In comparing the two Hyperions and testing the hypothesis about Miltonic influence, one needs to consider both the broad revisions (changes in structure, cuts, additions) and the particular ones (verbal alterations in lines that are taken over from the first version). Local changes provide the most tangible form of evidence; they also offer fascinating instances of the poetic craftsman at work.

In the published text of 1820, Hyperion's minions stand amazed and full of fear ‘like anxious men / Who on wide plains gather in panting troops, / When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers’ (H I, 198-200), but in The Fall they are ‘like anxious men / Who on a wide plain gather in sad troops’ (FH II, 42-3). ‘Sad’ is a wonderful choice, almost Shakespearean in its tragic foreboding (one recalls Cleopatra's gathering of her ‘sad captains’). What is interesting about this ‘revision’ is that it is actually a return to Keats's original text, for the holograph manuscript of Hyperion shows that ‘panting’ was Keats's third attempt, the second being ‘sad eyed’ and the first ‘sad’ (in the second and third versions the ‘a’ before ‘plain’ is cut to make room for the extra syllable later in the line). Keats famously remarked that ‘things which [I] do half at Random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of Propriety’ (Letters, 1, p. 142): in exercising his judgment as he revised Hyperion into The Fall, Keats discovered that his half random first thought was his best.

At several points Keats actually improved the text of Hyperion as a result of working on The Fall. Saturn's shady vale gave him trouble in the original manuscript. The second sentence of the poem originally read

                                                            No stir of air was there,
Not so much Life as what an eagle's wing
Would spread upon a field of green-ear'd corn
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

Unhappy (and rightly so) with ‘as what’, Keats erased ‘what an eagle's’ and replaced it with ‘a young vultur[e]'s’. Still unhappy—the ornithological uncertainty is symptomatic—he cancelled the whole two lines and replaced them with the following, written vertically in the right hand margin: ‘Not so much life as on a summer's day / Robs not at all the dandelion's fleece.’ The next time Keats worked on his manuscript, it was to use it as a source for The Fall. And it was at this point that the image came good:

                                                            No stir of life
Was in this shrouded vale, not so much air
As in the zoning of a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest[.]

(FH I, 310-14)

The Hyperion manuscript and the Woodhouse transcripts of it retained the dandelion version, but when the 1820 volume was in proof Keats altered the lines in accordance with the revision for The Fall, to produce the published text:

                                                            No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

(H I, 7-10)

Two things are striking about this revision. First, there is Keats's capacity to recognize when an image does not need changing—from first version to last, the final line of the sentence remains perfect in its stasis. And secondly, the fact that his concern with local poetic texture is not confined to ‘Miltonic’ passages, for none of the several versions here is perceptibly embroiled with the language of Paradise Lost.

Again, in his original manuscript Keats struggled in an attempt to convey the sickly sweet smell of incense. ‘A nausea’, he begins. ‘A nauseous feel’, he then tries, but ‘feel’ is heavily crossed out, perhaps because it smacked of Leigh Huntism. ‘Poison’ then replaces ‘nauseous’ and ‘feel’ has to be reinstated: the line thus becomes ‘A poison feel of brass and metal sick’ (manuscript draft of H I, 189). But when the manuscript is adapted for The Fall, Keats again rejects ‘feel’, so that in the new poem the line becomes ‘Savour of poisonous brass and metals sick’ (FH II, 33). The next year, the published text of Hyperion follows this, though with ‘metal’ back in the singular to avoid the clashing ‘s’.

In these cases, there is an equivalence between The Fall and the published text of Hyperion. Sometimes, however, the two manuscript versions share details that the published text lacks. Thea addresses Saturn in the published Hyperion: ‘to the level of his ear / Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake’ (H I, 46-7). In The Fall of Hyperion this reads: ‘to the level of his hollow ear / Leaning, with parted lips, some words she spake’ (FH I, 348-9, my italics). Thanks to the epithet ‘hollow’, the reader may visualize the ear more vividly, while also gaining a fuller sense of loss and emptiness. Saturn has been dispossessed of his kingdom and his body has correspondingly been emptied out. His unsceptred hand is listless and his realmless eyes are closed; so too his kingly ear, which his subjects must often have tried to bend and whisper in for favour, is now hollow. This turns out to be another of Keats's fine first thoughts afterwards confirmed by his judgment: the holograph manuscript of Hyperion shares ‘hollow’ with The Fall. The word has been sacrificed in the published text because of a more technical concern about ‘propriety’: the problem with ‘hollow’ is that it makes the line hypermetric by a full foot. For this reason it was cut, almost certainly by Woodhouse.¹⁷ Here, then, revision belongs not to the poet but to his ‘editor’—Woodhouse has undertaken in a modest way the kind of tidying up that Keats's publisher, John Taylor, performed so extensively and damagingly upon the works of John Clare. ‘Revision’ occurs in the process of transforming the text from script to print. The manuscript belongs to the poet and is not subject to the strictures of critics, but Woodhouse recognizes that the reviewers who had savaged Endymion would have been quite capable of pouncing on a hypermetric line in Hyperion and condemning it as an inept Cockneyism. He revises accordingly.

These four examples show that the revision of Hyperion is complex and various. It involves two versions of the original poem with The Fall standing between them; it involves Woodhouse as well as Keats. And it does not always involve the question of Miltonic language. Even where there is a ‘Miltonic inversion’, the process is not always the straightforward one of ‘de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing’¹⁸ that critical orthodoxy takes it to be. Here are the two versions of some lines towards the end of Thea's address to Saturn:

Saturn, sleep on:—Me thoughtless, why should I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?

and

Saturn, sleep on:—O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?

If we are to believe that Keats is going through his poem de-Miltonizing it, we would expect ‘Me thoughtless’ to be the original version—for that is a highly Miltonic locution—and ‘O thoughtless’ to be the revised one. But in fact it is the other way round: ‘Me thoughtless’ is from The Fall (FH I, 368-9; H I, 68-9). Keats has introduced a Miltonism, contaminated the innocuous ‘O thoughtless’ of Hyperion.

This is not a unique instance. A wholly new line, ‘Ponderous upon my senses a whole moon’ (FH I, 392), has a Miltonic word order, yet it occurs a few lines after what is obviously a cut aimed at de-Miltonization, the removal of the circumlocutory description of oak trees as ‘Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods’ (H I, 73). It is also shortly after the substitution of ‘bending’ (FH I, 386) for the Miltonic, latinate ‘couchant’ (H I, 87). There is a similar pattern of de-Miltonizing cheek by jowl with re-Miltonizing in Keats's treatment of the lines that became the opening of canto two of The Fall. ‘Mortal omens drear’ (H I, 169), with its Miltonic postponed adjective, becomes the uninverted ‘dire prodigies’ (FH II, 18), and the idiosyncratic Miltonic verbal form of ‘Came slope upon the threshold of the west’ (H I, 204) is simplified to ‘Is sloping to the threshold of the west’ (FH II, 48). Yet in the same sequence the plain English of ‘And so, when harbour'd in the sleepy west’ (H I, 190) is polysyllabized into ‘Wherefore when harbour'd in the sleepy west’ (FH II, 34).¹⁹ And if Keats had been attempting extensive de-Miltonization he would surely have removed the whole of the epic simile concerning Hyperion's minions and the anxious men gathering on the plain, rather than merely changed ‘panting’ back to ‘sad’.

This apparent confusion of strategies suggests that the pattern of revision was less coherent than Keats made out in his letters of September 1819. At the local level of vocabulary he is simply following his instincts, proving his imagery upon his pulses. Sometimes those instincts lead him to de-Miltonize, while on other occasions his mind continues to move in a Miltonic way. Only when he rationalizes afterwards does he single out the issue of Miltonic diction.

Nor can the new introductory section be described as single-mindedly anti-Miltonic. One moment Keats writes new and highly Miltonic lines:

                                                            a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal
By angel tasted, or our mother Eve[.]

(FH I, 29-31)

This makes the garden in which the poet finds himself specifically Edenic; he is a belated Miltonist picking up the refuse left after the meal in book five of Paradise Lost. Just six lines later, however, Keats introduces in a distinctly un-Miltonic way a mythological figure who had become associated with Milton. Romantic figurations of Proserpina, especially Keats's, almost invariably allude to Milton's fair field of Enna where Proserpine gathered flowers,²⁰ but here in The Fall Keats writes of a banquet for ‘Proserpine return'd to her own fields, / Where the white heifers low’ (FH I, 37-8). Those white heifers are unlike anything in Milton—they come from the Elgin marbles and the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, while Proserpine's return to ‘her own fields’ anticipates the homecoming of ‘To Autumn’.

Some of the finest touches in the second Hyperion are the products of the distinctively post-Odes Keats. Shortly after the heifer image, the idiom of the Grecian urn recurs in conjunction with ‘Nightingale’-like intoxication and slumber:

Among the fragrant husks and berries crush'd,
Upon the grass I struggled hard against
The domineering potion; but in vain:
The cloudy swoon came on, and down I sunk
Like a Silenus on an antique vase.

(FH I, 52-6)

In the very thorough footnotes of Miriam Allott's edition of the poems, the phrasing of this passage is said to recall some lines in Henry Cary's translation of Dante: ‘When I, who had so much of Adam with me, / Sank down upon the grass, o'ercome with sleep’²¹ This echo is bound up with a major complexity in Keats's revisionary procedure. It is undoubtedly true that, although there are certain marks of the Inferno in the first Hyperion, both the structure and the vocabulary of The Fall are a great deal more Dantesque. In particular, the earthly paradise cantos at the end of the Purgatorio are a vital source for what is new in the second poem.²² It is attractive to suppose that Milton gives way to Dante as a model. Dante might be seen as a less oppressive influence: since he did not write in the same language as the ephebe, he does not strangle him. To become the English Dante is a nice solution to the problem of the impossibility of being a second Milton.

But in a sense the English Dante already existed, and Keats was close to him: he knew both Henry Cary and his translation (it had been one of the few books he had taken on the Scottish walking tour immediately after which he began the first Hyperion). And Cary's translation, far from being in Dantesque terza rima, was in Miltonic blank verse, replete with inversions and latinate vocabulary. Cary started Miltonizing Dante as soon as he started translating him, as may be seen from the very beginning of his Hell:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
                    mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
                    che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ah quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
          esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
          che nel pensier rinova la paura!

(Inferno I, 1-6)

is rendered

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell,
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews[.]

(Hell I, 1-7)

‘Gloomy’ will do for ‘oscura’, but the long vowel sounds are gloomily Miltonic; ‘astray’ hangs and ‘Renews’ is run on in the manner of Paradise Lost's blank verse; ‘diritta via’ is inverted to ‘path direct’; ‘task’ is not so much licensed by ‘cosa’ as generated by Milton's ‘sad task’ in the invocation to book nine (PL IX, 13). Because of Cary, Milton and Dante were not really alternative models for Keats. He tried reading Dante in the original before revising Hyperion, as if to distance himself from the Miltonic Cary, but in reading a poem in a language not well known to him he could not get away from the idiom of the translation that he knew.

There is a further reason why the hypothesis of Dante replacing Milton will not do, and this brings us to the broader aspect of Keats's revision. The first Hyperion breaks off with Apollo about to become a god. His achievement of godhead depends on his initiation into suffering. He looks into the face of Mnemosyne and seems to achieve knowledge:

Mute thou remainest—mute! yet I can read
A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me[.]

(H III, 111-18)

The germ of the second Hyperion resides in these lines. In the revised poem Keats develops this idea of Mnemosyne teaching how it is necessary to embrace suffering; he applies it, however, to the poet instead of the emergent god. Mnemosyne, now called Moneta, says that the poet, the first-person narrator, cannot achieve vision until for him ‘the miseries of the world / Are misery’ and he ‘will not let them rest’ (FH I, 148-9). In famous lines, she distinguishes between the poet and the dreamer—they are ‘Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes’ (FH I, 200); the true poet's vision is agonizingly tragic, not dreamily romantic. Moneta's lesson is that of the sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’: the book of romance must be closed and that of tragedy burned through instead. It is also the lesson of Keats's letter to Reynolds about the mind as a mansion of many apartments—the poet must pass through the light intoxicating chamber into the dark passages beyond (Letters, 1, p. 281). Significantly, it was while he was working on The Fall that Keats wrote his tragedy Otho the Great—not by any stretch of imagination his greatest work, but one that reveals the direction in which he was developing. A letter to Bailey of 14 August 1819 juxtaposes the two works: ‘I [hav]e a[l]so been writing parts of my Hyperion [i.e. Fall] and [c]ompleted 4 Acts of a Tragedy’ (Letters, 2, p. 139). In The Fall's dialogue between narrator and Moneta, Keats dramatizes the concerns he had previously explored monologically in the letters; it is here if it is anywhere that he takes his ‘first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama’ (Letters, 1, p. 218). The move towards tragedy is central to the revision of both the content and the form of Hyperion.

In the revised version the fall of the Titans becomes not the substance of the poem but a narrative which Moneta tells the poet in order to initiate him into tragedy. Keats is specific about this in lines, influenced by those of Apollo, that occur shortly before the vision begins and we hear the familiar ‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn’:

So at the view of sad Moneta's brow,
I ached to see what things the hollow brain
Behind enwombed: what high tragedy
In the dark secret chambers of her skull
Was acting, that could give so dread a stress
To her cold lips, and fill with such a light
Her planetary eyes; and touch her voice
With such a sorrow.

(FH I, 275-82)

Apollo in Hyperion finds knowledge of dire events pouring ‘into the wide hollows’ of his brain. The dream structure of The Fall means that the whole poem takes place in the wide hollows of the poet's brain; now, in a further layer of vision, the poet looks into the hollows of Moneta's brain and sees a drama enacted there. Moneta, a figuration of Memory, carries within the dark secret chambers of her skull the dark memory of the primal tragedy, that of Fall. The Fall is the same event as in the first version of the poem but its function is changing: it now serves as an admonition. The revision of the name Mnemosyne (memory) into Moneta signals the darkening. Paradoxically, however, the darkened vision also provides comfort: Moneta's eyes beam ‘like the mild moon, / Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not / What eyes are upward cast’ (FH I, 269-71). Christopher Ricks says finely of this, ‘The blank splendour of the moon is a type of the blank (not empty) splendour of art … The consolation which Keats here imagines, he at the same time provides; he comforts those he sees not, and this is of the essence of art.’²³ For Keats, as is made clear by both the Lear sonnet and Moneta's claim that only those poets to whom the miseries of the world are misery can pour out a balm upon the world, this capacity to give comfort is the preserve of tragedy.

It is in this idea of Fall as tragedy that Keats departs radically from both Milton and Dante. Milton originally intended to write the story of the Fall of man as a tragedy called Adam Unparadised, but he changed his mind and incorporated it into a larger pattern which embraced redemption and made the Fall Fortunate, felix culpa. So too with the structure of Dante's epic: the Inferno contains many tragedies within it, but it is followed by the experience of Purgatorio and ultimately the redemption of Paradiso—it is a divine comedy. There are strong purgatorial elements in The Fall of Hyperion, as in the Lear sonnet, but there is no sense of an emergence into a New Jerusalem.

The first Hyperion, like Paradisie Lost and the Divine Comedy, has a progressive pattern, a sense of acceptance, summed up in Oceanus' magnificent lines on the movement towards ‘ripeness’ and his belief that the older gods ‘fall by course of Nature's law’ (H II, 181), that

on our heels a fresh perfection treads
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness …

(H II, 212-15)

All this must go if the Fall of the Titans is to be rewritten as a tragedy rather than a necessary, if pathos-filled, process in the progress of history. The new gods like Apollo must be excluded, as must Oceanus' speech and other consolations. As part of the revision into tragedy, Keats inserts into the story of Saturn lines like the following, in which the poet makes himself into a tragic artist, taking on the burden of suffering, even assuming the aura of a tragic character who longs for death:

                              Without stay or prop
But by my own weak mortality, I bore
The load of this eternal quietude,
The unchanging gloom …
                                                  Oftentimes I pray'd
Intense, that death would take me from the vale
And all its burthens. Gasping with despair
Of change, hour after hour I curs'd myself[.]

(FH I, 388-91, 396-9)

Contrast this ‘Despair / Of change’ with Oceanus’ language of progress. The tone of Saturn's own speech is transformed from questioning (‘search, Thea, search!’—H I, 116, 121) to lamentation (‘Moan, brethren, moan’—FH I, 412, 427). Hyperion does not use the word ‘moan’ in Saturn's speech; The Fall uses it thirteen times, transforming what Saturn says into something like a Greek tragic lament, a ‘dolorous accent from a tragic harp’ (FH I, 444). In Hyperion Saturn is one of Milton's bold fallen angels plotting recovery; in The Fall he is enfeebled, lost, tragic (his plan to form and rule a new world, reminiscent of Satan's proposal to make mischief on earth, has been cut). In Hyperion, passion makes Saturn stand at the end of the speech—he has roused himself, if no other. In The Fall he remains seated, forlorn (H I, 135; FH I, 446).

The obvious pattern for a tragedy on the fall of the Titans was Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, but, as Shelley was demonstrating at this time, that play always implies a Prometheus Unbound—a release, a happy ending, an overall comic structure. While the obvious pattern for writing tragedy in English was Shakespeare, the lameness of Otho the Great had shown Keats that Shakespearean drama was inimitable. Tragedy, as much as Milton, could be an impasse. It was, furthermore, an impasse that was not merely formal.

Keats interpreted Paradise Lost as a politically progressive, republican poem. One of his marginal notes reads:

How noble and collected an indignation against Kings … His [Milton's] very wishing should have the power to pull that feeble animal Charles from his bloody throne. ‘The evil days’ had come to him—he hit the new System of things a mighty mental blow—the exertion must have had or is yet to have some sequences—

(Wittreich, p. 556)

Here Keats hints at an analogy between Milton during the Restoration and himself in post-1815 Europe, confronted with the Bourbon Restoration in France, the Holy Alliance of monarchs, and what Hazlitt scathingly called ‘Legitimacy’ all around. Like Shelley, Keats hoped that Milton could exert a positive political influence. The Miltonic first Hyperion is a progressive poem; it concerns a revolution, and Oceanus' lines make clear that the new regime is superior to the old.²⁴ Leigh Hunt spoke of the poem's ‘transcendental cosmopolitics’,²⁵ and contemporary readers would have recognized the ‘progress poem’ as a liberal genre, concerned with the development of enlightened political institutions. Apollo is a progressive figure, associated by Keats with ‘the march of passion and endeavour’ (Letters, 1, p. 207)—a kind of superior Napoleon. Like Hazlitt, Keats viewed Napoleon as the sword-arm of revolutionary values, but when it came to The Fall, his artistic interest was focused on those defeated by revolution; his sympathies were with the fallen gods, the old regime. In Hyperion Saturn is ‘quiet as a stone’ (H I, 4), whereas in The Fall he is a stone, a sculptured representation rather than a realized character: The Fall looks to the past not the future, to the statues of the old gods, not the progress of the new ones; it is about the recovery of memory, not the birth of a bright new regime.

Keats's poetry and his politics are at odds here. At precisely the time he gave up the second Hyperion, the third week of September 1819, he wrote his most sustained and progressive political letters: ‘All civil[iz]ed countries become gradually more enlighten'd and there should be a continual change for the better …’ (Letters, 2, p. 193). Keats gives examples of how the tyranny of monarchy has been overthrown; he posits a model of historical development: ‘Three great changes have been in progress—First for the better, next for the worse, and a third time for the better once more.’ It is a pattern of revolution, reaction, and new struggle—a pattern which is being acted out in ‘The present struggle in England of the people’ (ibid.). Keats was writing the month after the Peterloo massacre; indeed on 13 September he witnessed the throng, which he estimated at thirty thousand people, that had taken to the streets to greet the radical orator Henry Hunt as he entered London. Within three days he resolved to abandon The Fall of Hyperion. His tragic vision and his progressive politics proved incompatible; he had learnt the lesson of Hazlitt's essay on Coriolanus, with its claim that poetry is an aristocratic, not a levelling, principle: tragedy sympathizes with the fallen rulers. Perhaps with this lesson in mind, and out of a desire to resist it, he chose to publish the more progressive work, Hyperion rather than The Fall, in 1820.

Keats's concern with the possibility that salvation will be political should not, however, be overemphasized. At his most characteristic he enables us to live with loss, not to glimpse some future salvation. Keats did not trumpet prophecies in the manner of Shelley. He believed, with Moneta, that it was not the business of poets to ‘Labour for mortal good’ (FH I, 159) in the same manner as political activists like Henry Hunt. Perhaps because of his personal and familial circumstances, he always engaged most deeply with the mystery of suffering. His remarks about giving up on the Hyperion project because of its Miltonic diction are a screen for the deeper sense in which he wanted to detach himself from Milton, namely his agnostic need to get away from a structure of felix culpa stemming from belief in some ultimate spiritual redemption. Keats said in his letter on life as a mansion of many apartments that Wordsworth had gone further than Milton in seeing into the pain of the human heart. The problem with Milton was his imposition of a divine pattern upon human suffering, his faith in a Christian solution to the mystery of life. Keats rejected this irritable reaching after a conclusion. No longer striving for the moon with Endymion, he had become a profoundly uneschatological poet. In the second Hyperion he reached a similar state to that of Wordsworth in the darker passages of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Excursion. As King Lear takes upon himself ‘the mystery of things’ and as Wordsworth feels ‘the burthen of the mystery’, so Keats, when he looks into the face of Moneta, takes on ‘the depth / Of things’ (FH I, 304-5). This revision of ‘the life of things’ takes the Wordsworthian in the tragic direction that Keats imagined as his own, away from the ‘chearful faith’ which Wordsworth had inherited from Milton and the lightening of the burden in which ‘Tintern Abbey’ invests its hopes. The state which Lear and the personae of Wordsworth and Keats enter is the one which Keats called negative capability, the willingness to live with uncertainties and doubts. From this state follows a refusal to come to conclusions. ‘The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one[']s mind about nothing’, Keats wrote during that same momentous week in September 1819 (Letters, 2, p. 213). He could not therefore conclude The Fall; it had to remain a fragment like the poem it was revising. In its lack of closure Hyperion had found its true form.

Notes

1. John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 316-38.

2. Published in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (New York, 1965), repr. with the date 1964 in Bloom's The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago, 1971).

3. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973). In the case of Bloom, the key intermediary text was his study of Yeats, published in 1970.

4. Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1981), p. 120.

5. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 24 September 1819, in The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), Vol. 2, p. 212. Subsequent quotations from Keats's letters are followed in my text by volume and page reference to this edition.

6. For Bloom's reading of The Fall of Hyperion as a ‘revision’ of Milton and Wordsworth, see Chapter 5 of his Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, 1976).

7. The annotations are reproduced in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. J. A. Wittreich Jr (Cleveland, Ohio, 1970), cited hereafter as Wittreich.

8. ‘Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost—he is “sagacious of his Quarry” [PL X, 281], he sees Beauty on the wing, pounces upon it and gorges it to the producing his essential verse … in no instance is this sort of perseverance more exemplified than in what may be called his stationing or statu[a]ry. He is not content with simple description, he must station’—annotation to Paradise Lost VI, 422-3, Wittreich, p. 559. The description of Saturn and Thea early in Hyperion is a fine piece of Miltonic statuary: ‘these two were postured motionless, / Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’ (I, 85-6).

9. Letters, 2, pp. 14-15, 42; Woodhouse, note in his copy of Endymion, cited in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1970), p. 394.

10. ‘Shakespeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me’ (to Bailey, 14 August 1819, Letters, 2, p. 139); ‘the Paradise Lost becomes a greater wonder’ (to Reynolds, 24 August 1819, Letters, 2, p. 146).

11. See The Keats Circle, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1965), Vol. 2, p. 72. According to Stillinger, Brown's reference cannot be dated more precisely than ‘toward the end of 1819’ (Poems of John Keats, p. 676).

12. Here I paraphrase Jack Stillinger, in his edition of The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 640. All my quotations (save those from the holograph manuscript) are taken from this edition. The poet's holograph manuscript of the first Hyperion is extant and now held by the British Library. There is a fine facsimile edited by Ernest de Selincourt: Hyperion: A Facsimile of Keats's Autograph Manuscript with a Transliteration of the MS of The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream (Oxford, 1905). Keats's holograph of The Fall is not extant; there are two complete transcripts, one by Woodhouse and one by two of his clerks, and a transcript of the first 326 lines only by Charlotte Reynolds.

13. See John D. Rosenberg, ‘Keats and Milton: The Paradox of Rejection’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 6 (1957), pp. 87-95; Stuart M. Sperry Jr, ‘Keats, Milton and The Fall of Hyperion’, PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 77 (1962), pp. 77-84; Paul Sherwin, ‘Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion’, PMLA, 93 (1978), pp. 383-95; Nancy Moore Goslee, Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, and Shelley (Alabama, 1985). Verbal details are charted in M. R. Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship (Oxford, 1933, repr. London, 1964), and the notes to Miriam Allott's edition.

14. It is not often noted that the holograph manuscript of Hyperion runs ‘Book 1st’, ‘Canto 2nd’, ‘Canto 3’. ‘Book II’ and ‘Book III’ in the 1820 printed text derive from the transcript by Woodhouse, which was in turn transcribed by two of his clerks and then used as the printer's copy.

15. For the influence of the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ on The Fall and the 1819 odes, see Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 205-8, 242-3.

16. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), Vol. 1, pp. 296-7. Marjorie Levinson notes the connection between the two passages in The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 169.

17. See Stillinger's textual notes, The Poems of John Keats, p. 640.

18. Sidney Colvin's phrase, John Keats (London, 1917), p. 447.

19. Woodhouse noticed this emendation: in the transcript that was used as printer's copy in 1820, he underscored ‘And so’ and wrote ‘Wherefore’ on the opposite verso (Stillinger, The Poems of John Keats, p. 641).

20. PL IV, 268-72, praised by Keats as one of two extraordinary Miltonic beauties ‘unexampled elsewhere’ (Wittreich, p. 559).

21. Purgatory IX, 9-10, in Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Cary (1814, repr. London, 1908).

22. See John Livingston Lowes, ‘Hyperion and the Purgatorio’, TLS [Times Literary Supplement] (11 January 1936), p. 35; John Saly, ‘Keats's Answer to Dante: The Fall of Hyperion’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 14 (1965), pp. 65-78; and Ralph Pite, ‘Dante's Influence on Coleridge and Keats: “The Circle of our Vision”’ (unpubl. Cambridge Ph.D. diss., 1989). For Keats's markings in his copy of Cary's 1814 Dante, see Robert Gittings, The Mask of Keats (London, 1956).

23. Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974), p. 191.

24. For the politics of the first Hyperion, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), p. 151, and Alan J. Bewell, ‘The Political Implication of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), pp. 220-9.

25. Hunt's Autobiography, in Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London, 1971), p. 255.