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Keats' Poetry Philosophy: Negative Capability & the Poet's Role in 'The Fall of Hyperion', Study notes of Poetry

University of Dayton (UD)Poetry

Keats' concept of 'negative capability' and its implications for the role of the poet in his epic fragment 'the fall of hyperion'. Keats argues that the poet must be capable of doubt, uncertainty, and inhabiting other sensibilities. The speaker in 'the fall of hyperion' is keats himself, and the poem deals with the artist's quest for identity and the relationship between poetic vision and death. The essay also discusses the influence of moneta, the goddess of memory and mother of the muses, on keats' conception of poetry and the poet's place in the world.

What you will learn

  • How does the theme of identity relate to Hyperion's fall and Keats' own situation in 'The Fall of Hyperion'?

Typology: Study notes

2021/2022

Uploaded on 09/27/2022

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Julia Finkelstein
Keats’ Fall of Hyperion
Close Reading
In his letters, Keats writes of “negative capability,” which he defines as “when man is
capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason.” In other words, the poet must be willing to remain in doubt so that he can imagine
himself as someone else: the “I” in the poet is not the poetic self, but instead is a persona the poet
inhabits. Unlike the Wordsworthian “egotistic sublime,” Keats conceives of the poet as lacking
his own identity:
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is
continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men
and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an
unchangeable attribute—the poet has none: no identity—he is certainly the most
unpoetical of all God’s creatures.
It is ironic that the poet himself is the “most unpoetical of all God’s creatures,” implying that the
poet as subject is lackluster. The Poet’s role then, is to be “Chamelion” and imagine himself in
another’s sensibility, or “fill some other Body.”
With this philosophy of poetry in mind, it seems somewhat surprising that the speaker in
Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion is Keats himself (or at least a poet) and that a major theme of this
epic fragment is the artist’s quest for identity, which I argue is related to Hyperion’s fall and
Keats’ own fall—his imminent death. What does it mean that the titans are replaced by another
set of Gods, or more specifically, Apollo the god of poetry and prophecy replaces Hyperion?
Geoffrey Hartman in his essay, “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats’s ‘Hyperion,’”
writes, “Nothing lightens the sufferance of temporality, except that it is the gods themselves who
are subjected to time, and the poet suffers their suffering rather than his own” (68). Hartman thus
proposes that the gods stand in for the poetic self. They, like Keats, are running against the clock;
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Julia Finkelstein Keats’ Fall of Hyperion Close Reading In his letters, Keats writes of “negative capability,” which he defines as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, the poet must be willing to remain in doubt so that he can imagine himself as someone else: the “I” in the poet is not the poetic self, but instead is a persona the poet inhabits. Unlike the Wordsworthian “egotistic sublime,” Keats conceives of the poet as lacking his own identity: A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none: no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. It is ironic that the poet himself is the “most unpoetical of all God’s creatures,” implying that the poet as subject is lackluster. The Poet’s role then, is to be “Chamelion” and imagine himself in another’s sensibility, or “fill some other Body.” With this philosophy of poetry in mind, it seems somewhat surprising that the speaker in Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion is Keats himself (or at least a poet) and that a major theme of this epic fragment is the artist’s quest for identity, which I argue is related to Hyperion’s fall and Keats’ own fall—his imminent death. What does it mean that the titans are replaced by another set of Gods, or more specifically, Apollo the god of poetry and prophecy replaces Hyperion? Geoffrey Hartman in his essay, “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats’s ‘Hyperion,’” writes, “Nothing lightens the sufferance of temporality, except that it is the gods themselves who are subjected to time, and the poet suffers their suffering rather than his own” (68). Hartman thus proposes that the gods stand in for the poetic self. They, like Keats, are running against the clock;

it is only a matter of time before Keats will die and the Olympians will expel the titans. Because Romanticism is known for working in allegory, perhaps we can read Hyperion’s fall as being representative of the poet’s own plight. The last three lines of the first stanza—“Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse/Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known/When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave”—suggests the relationship between poetic vision (or dream) and death. We will only know whether or not the poem, The Fall of Hyperion, is the work of a religious fanatic or a poet when the “warm scribe my hand is in the grave,” or when the creator is dead. Perhaps “fanatic” and “poet” are not mutually exclusive. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fanatic” as “Of an action or speech: Such as might result from possession by a deity or demon; frantic, furious. Of a person: Frenzied, mad. Obs.” Thus instead of the poet “filling some other Body” such as the body of a God, the deity possesses the poet. The poet’s vision of Hyperion’s fall, then, is can be read as psychological, or the poet’s inner conflict on the nature of art. Moneta, the goddess of memory and mother of the muses, challenges the speaker’s conception of the role of the poet. In order to enter the temple, the speaker must defend poetry, or at least justify the poet’s influence on the world. What benefit canst though do, or all thy tribe, to the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing. A fever of thyself. A “fever of thyself” (or fits of poetic inspiration) is evocative of Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” in that it renders the self as the source of inspiration rather than some exterior object. Perhaps this is why the rest of the poem focuses on the figures of the titans and their torment rather than Keats’ own torment as a poet. Keats does not want to share the same fate as those poets who revel in an egotistical “fever of thyself.” Apollo, the god of poetry and prophecy, uses

world, a liminal space between life and death, and, just like the Gods, the poet is paralyzed by questioning his place is within the cosmos. This poem is at the moment just before Hyperion and Keats fall. It seems safer, then, to resort to “negative capability” by having the speaker go on a “Danteque dream-voyage” (Hartman, 60), and therefore displace his own fears of mortality onto the Gods. The problem, then, is that humans become completely removed from the epic narrative, which is why it’s a tenuous to argue that Keats meant for Hyperion to mirror his own difficulties as a dying poet. It is important to note, however, that Apollo replaces Hyperion, and that both Gods are associated with poetry and with fire. Hyperion is only mentioned in Canto II, but get a sense of pathos as the speaker observes the God, “blazing on his orbed fire,” holding on to life, like Keats holds onto his spark (or fever) of inspiration, but that light of inspiration (at least for Hyperion and Keats) is about to go out.