"Life to him would be death to me" : The Romantic Struggle against the Miltonic Legacy in John Keats's Hyperion

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Hyperion constitutes Keats's ambition to adopt the high style of epic poetry, a challenging presence for English poets versed in Virgil and Homer, and for whom Milton's Paradise Lost remained the form's most formidable English legacy. Undeniably, Hyperion sustains the characteristic Miltonic qualities of diction, versification, the sublime, and moral absolutes. However, when Keats gave up completing the Hyperion poems, he explained to J. H. Reynolds in a letter of 21 September 1819, his abandonment of the Hyperion project by lamenting: "I have given up Hyperion-there were too many Miltonic inversions in it-Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour" (Letters 2. 167). Certainly, Keats's adoption of Miltonic verse distanced him from his own epic venture, and instead liberated him in an ambivalent but positive engagement with Miltonic style. The serious attempt to appropriate Milton's authoritative text allowed Keats the possibility to generate his own modern epic, transcending the limits of vision as prescribed by conventional literary criteria. Celebrating Milton's sublime imagery, Keats embraced both the passion and intensity of the sensuous imagery of Paradise Lost. As Keats proclaims in the "Marginalia": "Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost" (344). It was the Miltonic imagination that Keats was to qualify in his own pursuit and speculations, and which was eventually to attain the intensity of the pictorial and corporeal imagery of Hyperion. In the refinement of Milton's epic, speculation becomes a vital Keatsian term, as in the Miltonic physicality of the Titans and Apollo, and the envisaging of their sublime agony. The great pathos of the visual and corporeal imagery surrounding the Titans witnesses Keats's celebration and subversion of the Miltonic legacy.