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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.
1 All quotations of Keats's poetry and prose, except the letters, are from The Complete Works of John Keats, 5 vols., ed. Harry Buxton Forman (Glasgow: Gowans and Gray, 1900), hereafter cited as CW. For a view of Milton similar to Keats's, see Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets, in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, 34 vols., ed. P. P. Howe, v (London: Dent, 1930), 51, 57. Walter Jackson Bate discusses the impact of these lectures on Keats's conception of the poetical character in John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 259-60.
2 The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, 2 vols., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 212. All quotations from the letters are from this edition, hereafter Letters, and are henceforth cited in parentheses by volume and page number.
3 Stanza 5 recalls Milton's regenerative “false surmise” of a sympathetic Nature decking Lycidas' “Laureate Hearse” with vernal flowers, or rather the figures of pastoral artifice. Within the nightingale's bower, the space of fictional blindness and insight, Keats extends and intensifies the Miltonic interposition of ease, anticipating an “easeful Death” that is a splendid yet ironic rite of passage. Introjecting the sublime, for Keats, means introjecting death; the fictional vehicle is a laureate hearse. For Milton, however, fiction is not only a self-deceiving strategy but an insightful, if premature, guess at heaven; Milton projects the blindness of fiction as death (the pastoral as lost or mourned object) and reserves the sublime for the postfictional, postdeathly moment, introjecting the insight of fiction as immortality.
4 Cf. the invocation to Bk. iii of Paradise Lost, in which Milton and the nightingale are identified by synecdoche.
5 Keats embraces the “abstracted” stance of the sonnet's octave in a letter written to Tom during his Northern tour (i, 299-301); the counterpart of the sestet's stance is his condemnation of Miltonic “artfulness” after his abandonment of the Hyperion project (see esp. ii, 167, 212).
6 See Alvin B. Kernan, “Aggression and Satire: Art Considered as a Form of Biological Adaptation,” in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 126.
7 On the progress theme, see Reginald Harvey Griffith, “The Progress Pieces of the Eighteenth Century,” Texas Review, 5 (1920), 218-33; Edward B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 137-62; René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941); Rexmond C. Cochrane, “Bishop Berkeley and the Progress of Arts and Learning: Notes on a Literary Convention,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 17 (1954), 229-49; Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Blake and the Progress of Poesy,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 193-205; and Paul Sherwin, Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 84-93.
8 Usually depicted as Egyptian colossi, the Titans are also given Druidic associations (i.137; ii.35), lending credence to Hungerford's contention that, had the poem been completed, Saturn would have been solaced by a prophecy of the restoration of his reign in England. However, in terms of the grand-march-of-intellect theme, the primitive Druids are analogous to the pre-Hellenic Asiatic peoples. The Asiatic coloring of the Titans is in keeping with the geographical orientation of the progress myth, the Druidic coloring with its temporal orientation. On the eighteenth-century view of Milton as “Druid,” see J. M. S. Tompkins, “‘In Yonder Grave a Druid Lies,‘” Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 1-16.
9 Progress speculations can revolve on a south-north as well as an east-west axis. See Keats's denunciation of Milton's language as a “northern dialect accommodating itself to greek and latin inversions and intonations” (Letters, II, 212).
10 “Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost,” CW, iii, 26.
11 “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 45.
12 “Milton's Counterplot,” in Beyond Formalism, pp. 114-15.
13 See Letters, ii, 360; and his praise of “the Magnitude of Contrast” in Paradise Lost, in CW, iii, 19.
14 See Hartman, “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion,” in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 61.
15 Cf. Blake's Milton, where a reimagined Milton willingly descends out of the canon to redeem his descendant.
16 The quotation, from “To Homer,” refers to Keats but redounds upon Homer/Milton.
17 Louis Renza, an antagonistic critical brother, has helped clarify my understanding of the Saturn-Keats relationship, and much else.
18 My hitherto unacknowledged master, Harold Bloom, is the master of preposterous (in the sense of temporal inversion) reading/misreading. See esp. The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 139-55; A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 101-03, 125-43; and Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 83-111.
19 See Hartman's two brief yet splendid discussions of the Apollo-Adam connection: “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum,” in Beyond Formalism, pp. 135-37; and “Toward Literary History,” in the same collection, pp. 369-72.
