Critical Appreciation of “Hyperion”
It is commonplace of Keats criticism to present the poet as struggling against both a debilitating sense of his own immaturity and the wider public perception of him as ‘immature'. Keats's doleful suspicion that he was merely a 'weaver-boy' in the eyes of reviewers and other 'literary fashionables' was confirmed by Byron's caustic reference this 'pass a bed' poetry, and by John Gibson Lockhart's conclusion that Keats was only 'a boy of pretty abilities'.
In the prevailing callous critical atmosphere, Keats continued to prove himself the greatest of his contemporaries. Though he was never admitted in his lifetime, yet his approach towards fine or poor creations was par excellence. His assortment and denunciation of poetic process was from a full-grown mind.
Famous fragmentary poem “Hyperion” seems to have afforded Keats less satisfaction than any other of his works. It was printed, as the “Advertisement” shows, at his Publishers’ desire, “and contrary to the wish of the author.” Still later, he “re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally unfinished.”
“I have given up Hyperion,” Keats writes from Winchester, Sep. 22, 1819 “there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up.”
This phrase apparently refers to the mood in which he had just written those noble lines to Autumn, which we put, with Lamia, and five or six more pieces, amongst his maturest work; the work wherein art touches its genuine triumph in concealing itself: the work which, in matter and manner alike, embodies his most essential, his most intimate, genius. And, in the remarks, which follow, the poet clearly shows a consciousness that in Hyperion the “artist’s humour “was too prevalent: “the false beauty, proceeding from art,” blended with “the true voice of feeling.” Keats, criticizing here for the last time his own work, touches on the note, which is most sensible in his poetry, as it is that which lay the deepest in his own nature. Almost more than passion for beauty, although, indeed it is, rather, itself the fine flower of beauty, tenderness, almost passing into tremulousness, seems his characteristic. Here and there, whilst he was little more than a boy, we hear this note in excess.
But Keats, in both the qualities just named, true child of Spenser, has also the manliness of nature, the sanity of sentiment, which underlie everywhere that river of gold, which ripples through the Faerie Queene. Beyond any of his great compeers during the last two centuries, (if we may here venture thus to sum up the imperfect criticisms on his genius which are offered in these notes), Keats had inherited, not only as Man but as Poet, or rather, as Poet because he was so as Man, the inspiration and the magnanimity of the great age of our Muses; —more than any, he is true English-Elizabethan: Had the years of Milton been destined for him, of him, more than of any other it might have been prophesied, fortunate.
Despite the marvellous grandeur of its execution, the judgment of Keats upon this work appears to be thoroughly well founded. After an introduction worthy to be compared with what the Propylaea of the Acropolis at Athens must have been, at once in severe majesty and in refinement of execution, the interest of the story rapidly and irremediably falls off. It is, truly, to take a phrase from the Preface to Endymion, “too late a day.” The attempt to revivify an ancient myth, —as distinguished from an ancient story of human life, —however alluring, however illustrated by poets of genius, seems essentially impossible.
It is for the details, not for the whole, that we read Hyperion, or Prometheus Unbound, or the German Iphigeneia. Like the great majority of post-classical verse in classical languages, those modern myths are but exercises, (and, as such, with their value to the writer), on a splendid scale.
The story of which “Hyperion” tells the beginning is, in fact, far too remote, too alien from the modern world: it has neither any definite symbolical meaning, nor any of that “soft humanity” which underlies the wild magic of his other works, and has rendered possible a picture, true not only to Corinth two thousand years ago, but to all-time. Yet, with such strange vital force has he penetrated into the Titan world, and all but given the reality of life to the old shadows before him, that, had this miracle been possible, we may fairly say that Keats would have worked it.
The author was, hence, right in giving up “Hyperion”. Yet, by a singular irony of literary fate, “Hyperion” was the first of his poems, which seems to have reached fame beyond his own English circle of admirers. Byron, in a passage often quoted, placed its sublimity on a level with Aeschylus. But the criticisms, which it called forth from Shelley, are the most noteworthy. In Nov. 1820 we find him writing that he has received “a volume of poems by Keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called “Hyperion”.... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing. “Nor was this Shelley’s first impression only; for on 15 Feb. 1821 he returns to Keats: “His other poems are worth little; but, if the Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.”
If we remember the masterpieces contained in the precious little book of 1820, it may be reasonably held that even the political antagonists of Keats and his friends could hardly have exceeded these criticisms in blind prosaic injustice. So may one great poet, and he, snow-pure from taint of envy or malice, misunderstand and misestimate another!
BY SAMIA UMER
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