Milton's use of myth in Paradise lost and its bearing on Keats's use of myth in Hyperion
Gregory, John Michael
Gregory, John Michael
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1978
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Abstract
Keats's Hyperion, while not specifically Christian in purpose, was decidedly influenced by the Christian myth of Milton's Paradise Lost. The diction, style, theme, and the myth of Hyperion Keats consciously developed with Milton's epic in mind. Both poets combined the Christian with the classical; Milton described the Fall of Man from innocence, through experience, to redemption and rebirth, whereas Keats chose the definitive pagan account of the same theme--the fall of the Saturnian or Golden Age innocence and the arrival of the Olympian deities. Apollo, Keats's favorite mythic identity, effects the change from Titanic rule to a new age and power strong in beauty and knowledge. Apollo incorporates much of Keats's aesthetic, and for his development Keats borrowed from the Christian-pagan triad--God, Christ, Orpheus-in Milton's Paradise Lost. The mediator between man and nature, Apollo represents Keats's myth of process that suggests a working toward a one divine principle--the poet's highest imaginative insights and poetic expressions of Truth and Beauty. For Milton and Keats the loss of innocence is at once a myth of recovery and high spiritual significance. Adam and Eve would not remain forever in their Edenic surrounding. Implicit in this state is loss and suffering, and to yearn, like the Titans, for an irrecoverable state is hopeless. But through suffering and repentance is the way back to Paradise, a paradise within. In loss and sorrow is Beauty, the individual dignity intensified only when one has lost something truly meaningful and lovely. Keats's Hyperion is a fragment, but his sense of evolution, his delineation of Apollo, and his profound beliefs about suffering for the sake of truth are comparable to a cyclical structure--innocence, experience, rebirth--the traditional scheme of Romantic self-recognition poetry and the Christian pattern Milton used to justify God's ways to men.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Keats, John, 1795-1821. Hyperion
Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost
Mythology in literature
Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost
Mythology in literature
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Dissertation
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iii, 171 leaves, bound
Department
English