Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The politics of Keats’s early poetry
- 2 Endymion’s beautiful dreamers
- 3 Keats and the “Cockney School”
- 4 Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes
- 5 Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s epic ambitions
- 6 Keats and the ode
- 7 Late lyrics
- 8 Keats’s letters
- 9 Keats and language
- 10 Keats’s sources, Keats’s allusions
- 11 Keats and “ekphrasis”
- 12 Keats and English poetry
- 13 Byron reads Keats
- 14 Keats and the complexities of gender
- 15 Keats and Romantic science
- 16 The “story” of Keats
- 17 Bibliography and further reading
- Index
2 - Endymion’s beautiful dreamers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 The politics of Keats’s early poetry
- 2 Endymion’s beautiful dreamers
- 3 Keats and the “Cockney School”
- 4 Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes
- 5 Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s epic ambitions
- 6 Keats and the ode
- 7 Late lyrics
- 8 Keats’s letters
- 9 Keats and language
- 10 Keats’s sources, Keats’s allusions
- 11 Keats and “ekphrasis”
- 12 Keats and English poetry
- 13 Byron reads Keats
- 14 Keats and the complexities of gender
- 15 Keats and Romantic science
- 16 The “story” of Keats
- 17 Bibliography and further reading
- Index
Summary
We read Endymion with a sharp awareness of its role in the fashioning of Keats. He himself described it as a rite of passage: a “test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention [. . .] by which I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry”; a “[leap] headlong into the Sea” (KL 1.169-70, 374). For most readers, the thrill and tedium of reading Endymion - and the mixture of affection and irritation one feels for it - are linked to this sense of it as a young poet's testing ground: the biographical figure seems revealed in his preciosity, his ambition, his absorption, his overweening love of “fine Phrases” (KL 2.139), and his trying lapses of taste and judgment. The most influential analyses have acknowledged its critical place in Keats's poetic development: “In working out the destiny of his hero,” writes Stuart Sperry, Keats “was in fact working out his own.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Keats , pp. 20 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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