5 - Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s epic ambitions

Summary

Epic ambitions are dear to the poetical character. Milton, preoccupied with his election for great purpose, laments in Lycidas not only the death of a friend but also the compulsion the “sad occasion” places upon him to make trial of his powers before “season due” (1-7). In The Prelude, Wordsworth, another chief forebear to Keats's Hyperion project, relates his casting round for heroic matter, “some British theme, some old / Romantic tale by Milton left unsung,” and his settling at last on a “philosophic Song / Of Truth that cherishes our daily life” (1805 text; 1.179-80; 230-31). He was planning a three-part epic, The Recluse, to which this autobiography was a “prelude,” but he completed and published only one part (in nine books) in his lifetime: The Excursion (1814), which Keats knew and absorbed. It was The Prelude, begun in 1798 and published just after his death in 1850, that became Wordsworth's true epic, unfolding the core subject of modernity, the drama of self-consciousness. Citing the precedent of Milton elevating the subject of Paradise Lost above those of classical epics (“argument / Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles” [9.13-15]), Wordsworth credits his autobiographical “theme” as at least equal: “What pass'd within me” is, “in truth, heroic argument” (Prel. 3.173-74, 182). Keats's involvement with Hyperion would ultimately propel a journey “within,” The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, but with far less certain claims.