¹ Sleep and Poetry, 96 ff.

² Amy Lowell is the conspicuous exception.

³ Colvin comes close to this interpretation when he says on p. 172 of his John Keats, “.... the soul enamoured and pursuing Beauty cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with the lives and suffering of others.” But he does not indicate that the Beauty thus achieved is that high ideal of philosophic poetry which Keats in Sleep and Poetry announced as his objective.

⁴ Colvin, John Keats, p. 198.

⁵ C. L. Finney (“Keats's Philosophy of Beauty,” PQ, V, 1–19) interprets the poem as a neo-Platonic quest for immortality succeeding finally in love, after tracing the hero's progress through nature, art, and friendship. The Spenserian influence is here clearly established; but I would suggest that in the light of Sleep and Poetry the allegory of Endymion may likewise contain a somewhat more personal meaning.

⁶ It does not seem to me very important just what special meaning is assigned to these words; they are conclusive evidence of the controversy in his mind. Thorpe on p. 118 of his The Mind of John Keats says sensation “gives a sense of deepest truth through direct emotionalized intuition;” Colvin (John Keats, p. 153) says sensations “are intuitions of the mind and spirit.... as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking;” and Garrod says; “It is no more than if he said, ‘O for the pure gospel of the Lyrical Ballads‘” (Keats, p. 33).

⁷ This is not the point made by G. R. Elliott in “The Real Tragedy of Keats” (PMLA, XXXVI, 315 ff.). Elliott thinks the tragedy is that Keats longs for philosophy and can't find it. My point is that he longs for sensation, but drives himself to philosophy because of his sense of duty as a poet.

⁸ For proof that Hyperion is in reality a fragment and not a complete poem as Mr. J. M. Murry argues in Keats and Shakespeare (Oxford, 1925), p. 82, see my article, “Did Keats Finish Hyperion?” (Mod. Lang. Notes, XLIV (1929), 285–7).

⁹ Keats (Oxford, 1926), p. 72. Also see Finney, “The Fall of Hyperion,” JEGP, XXVII, 319 ff. for a discussion of Wordsworthian humanitarianism in Keats.

¹⁰ Thorpe says on this point: “But it is intuitive knowledge, gained neither by book, nor precept, nor consecutive reasoning that he (Apollo) now possesses” (The Mind of John Keats, p. 143). That is true, but it dos not therefore become sensation (see supra, note 6), for clearly Apollo is speaking of an intuitive and sympathetic knowledge of such things as “agonies, creations and destroyings.”

¹¹ See Garrod, p. 71.

¹² Amy Lowell, John Keats, II, 226. For a successful refutation of Miss Lowell's argument that Hyperion: A Vision preceded Hyperion, see Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, pp. 242–248.

¹³ See journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats covering the period from February 14, 1819, to May 3, 1819.

¹⁴ See Garrod, p. 72, where the author approaches this theory but does not accept it.

¹⁵ Garrod (pp. 98–99) insists that Keats is writing of the Soul. Do not the words I have italicized indicate that the Intellect is nearer the poet's meaning?

¹⁶ “Heresy Concerning Keats,” PMLA, XLIII, 1142–49.

¹⁷ The revision of Hyperion into Hyperion: A Vision, which apparently took place in August-September, 1819, (see Murry, pp. 242–3) need not affect the above theory. It can be explained either on the ground that after the period that ends with Lamia, Keats found himself drawn back into the state of mind that drove him to philosophy, in which case one will have to admit that the solution stated did not at once completely hold him; or on the ground that even though he admitted that the idea of the first Hyperion was wrong, he nevertheless thought there were sufficient artistic possibilities in it to justify another attempt. In either case, he found himself out of sympathy with the project (he says he gave it up because there were too many “Miltonic inversions” in it) and abandoned the idea.