'The load of this eternal quietude' : Keats, Wordsworth, and the Poetics of Belatedness

抄録

The later version of Keats's epic poem, 'The Fall of Hyperion', adopts the first-person narrator and takes the form of dream-vision. The intentions of the visionary framework merit exploration in terms of the poet's revisionist approach to Wordsworth, the most original poet of his times, and in relation to his pursuit of a new epic voice, which virtually starts with 'Ode to a Nightingale'. With its highly introspective voice, the Nightingale Ode approaches associationist psychology and circulating notions of originality, which makes it comparable to a group of Wordsworth's poems called 'Moods of My Own Mind'. While Wordsworth's typical 'mood' poems specify a time and place, Keats's poem offers an impersonal train of thought, which has a different effect on the reading process. The closing stanzas of the Ode also undermine the optimistic reaffirmation of personal identity (as in 'To the Cuckoo') by the speaker's act of identifying himself with the bird, and its result. An analysis of the ways in which Wordsworth introduces the Wanderer in The Excursion suggests that, in Canto r of the second 'Hyperion', Keats is guided by similar concerns as a post-Christian, post-Milton poet; among these is the need to commemorate his muse Moneta within the Enlightenment tradition, as well as to qualify the poet-dreamer for a meeting with the goddess. Moneta emerges as a guardian figure of the 'Soul-making' theory, while the Wanderer is a sage of natural wisdom. Moreover, Moneta, who favours Keats's hero with the vision of Hyperion, is characterised by her reticence, which contrasts with the Wanderer's eloquence and didacticism. As a criticism of Wordsworthian first-person voice, this trait and the underlying politics of reading are intended to amplify the meaning of Homeric objectivity, and to turn the fact of the poet's belated appearance in the literary tradition into the basis for his claim to originality.