Poetics Today
Keats’s Hyperion:
Time, Space, and the Long Poem
Lilach Lachman
Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv
Abstract Romantic critics have traditionally viewed Keats as a master of the lyrical
‘‘still object’’ and his Hyperion as a narrative failure. In this article, I aim to present a
different Keats, one whose work, moreover, sheds light on the relationship between
our making sense of the world (as a time-space construct) and the development of
narrative modes in the long poem. In exploring the time-space poetics of Keats’s Hyperion, this essay takes as its point of departure the narrative questions posed by the
shift from the classical model of Enlightenment epic to the Romantic long poem,
and so connects Keats’s narrative experimentation to a new (Romantic) paradigm.
Throughout, the central question is why and to what effect space became the focus
of this paradigmatic shift in the composition of the long poem. Various possibilities
of space poetics are examined, always (unlike Joseph Frank’s ‘‘spatial form’’) as an
interaction of the axes of world and composition, as well as in relation to temporality. Time-space organization functions in this context as an image of the world and
as a device for activating the reader. Historically, the changing hierarchy between
world and composition and their interplay with time should also enable us to trace
(dis)continuities between the Romantic model and its (post)modernist variants.
Time-Space: The Historical Question
The Romantic long poem questioned the coherence of the conventional
epic’s plot, its logic of time and space, and its laws of interconnecting the
narrative through action. In Hyperion Keats shapes the poet’s experience by
his use of progressive confrontation with remnants of the cultural past. In
Poetics Today : (Spring ) Copyright ©  by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
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his sequel poem, The Fall of Hyperion, the poet abandons his previous journey
across history and enters the space of his own dream. Both poems question
the logic of classical composition. In a series of episodes, the statuesque figures occupy the foreground against a shifting background of mythical and
visionary locations: a shady vale, a sun-palace with a thousand courts, an
enchanted island, and a ruined temple that collapses into the poet’s hollow brain. When Keats depicts Hyperion stooping over an ‘‘airy shore’’ and
plunging into the ‘‘deep night,’’ he allows us to shift our gaze from the god’s
bright palace to the waterfalls and torrents that populate the Titans’ ‘‘nest
of woe’’ (H .–).1 The movements of the protagonist (whether Saturn,
Hyperion, or Apollo) from one episode to the next, link such mythological spaces via what modern science terms a ‘‘rational division.’’ 2 The interval dividing two separate segments serves simultaneously as the end of the
first and the beginning of the second. In Keats’s long poem, every segment
is signaled by such a bounded location, where the movement ensures the
continuous unfolding of adjacent spaces. Accordingly, action is primarily
formed as a process of bodily and perceptual movement across contiguous
spaces.
However, this Keatsian logic of action exemplifies a paradoxical dynamic. On the one hand, by his linkage of one space to the next, as well
as by the way in which he embeds segments in episodes and episodes in
books, Keats seems to reinforce the overall mechanism of the epic, in which
time progresses in terms of chronology (whether along or against it). Accordingly, the dynamics delineated above can be viewed as parallel to the
traditional epic, where the notion of time (as movement) conventionally
ties one episode to the next in a lifelike manner. On the other hand, Keats
in fact displaces this lifelike logic (which is primarily chronological) and
instead multiplies time and space through a shift from the mimesis of the
world to its interpretation and construction by the viewer and reader. In
this process space loses its conventional geographical or territorial meaning and becomes a semiotic field: it is duplicated through other mediums
and texts (such as sculpture, painting, theater, or music), which are cited
from cultural or imaginary history, from works that are either classical or
simply invented according to the model of such works.
Further, in Hyperion, an event occurs not merely in the movement from
. Henceforth, I will use the following abbreviations: Hyperion will be referred to as H; The
Fall of Hyperion, FH.
. The part of any section that functions both as the ending of one segment and the beginning
of another, namely, the ‘‘rational interval,’’ is instrumental in Deleuze’s formalization of the
logic of segmentation. The ‘‘rational interval’’ operates in the ‘‘movement-image,’’ while
the ‘‘irrational interval’’ (which is ‘‘autonomous’’ and ‘‘irreducible’’) enables Deleuze to define
the ‘‘time-image’’ (Rodowick : , –).
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one state to another, but also when one state reveals a change in time and
space compared with another. The poem depicts a series of cultural moments that allow the poet to travel across time(s). In this journey, time is
extended as space and becomes a space-time dimension.3
What are the historical consequences of this functional interconnectedness of time and space? The radical shift from representation to construction and the consequent multiplication of time and space are commonly
associated with a (post)modernist paradigm; but, as I hope to demonstrate,
they actually arise within the Romantic paradigm.4 My analysis of Keats’s
. Throughout my argument about Keats’s spatio-temporal principles, I relate them to a
new (Romantic) paradigm that evolved in opposition to the Newtonian doctrine of absolute
time-space. Considering the possibly restricted accessibility of information about scientific
advances to the general reader, a few details and references on the topic may be in order.
Leclerc (: –), for example, argues that only partially in the nineteenth century and
more totally in the twentieth century did the reaction against Newton and the new Kantian
concept of time and space come into popular acceptance. At the same time, writers of the
eighteenth century, such as Swift, Sterne, and Wesley, demonstrate the incorporation of and
preoccupation with science (Backscheider ). Newton’s Opticks, rather than his mechanical
physics, was of more direct concern to poets of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(Nicolson ). Even though science had no immediate effect on popular culture, however,
from a more general historical perspective, the cultural paradigm shift which takes place in
Romanticism is described (for example, in Eichner’s  comprehensive survey) by reference
to the replacement of eighteenth-century mechanical physics and necessitarianism by theories of organicism. Hayles (: –) likewise focuses on the change in metaphors within
the shift from Newton to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific thinking. For the implications of that shift for the role of the mind in Romantic poetics, see Thorslev  (–)
and Tong  (–). My own research does not look for parallels which might indicate
an ‘‘influence’’ of science and philosophy on poetry; rather, it explores how the concept of
time and space manifests itself in poetics. As my grasp of the Romantic paradigm is informed
by later developments, I emphasize three ideas which underline the (post)Romantic cultural
thinking on time and space: first, the reaction to the belief that time was independent of motion; second, the conception of space not as an end or a boundary of an object, but rather as
a complex in which objects exist and move; and third, the post-Kantian presentation of time
and space as categories of perception. All three are crucial both for the replacement of the
Newtonian by the Romantic paradigm and for the Romantic experimentations with poetic
representation.
. The polemic concerning what constitutes the Romantic paradigm, or which critical paradigm to select, has a long history. To cite but a few historical signposts: Abrams ()
locates the Romantic paradigm in the shift from imitation to expression; Todorov (: –
) replaces imitation with ‘‘production’’; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy () focus on the
‘‘subject work’’ as the auto-production in the work of art; Wesling (: –) views it as
an ‘‘epistemological-prosodic break’’ and thereby adds formal and cognitive dimensions to
Wasserman’s () emphasis on the epistemological break. Shifting the emphasis from the
poet to the role of the reader, Rajan (, ) provocatively revises the New Critical lyrical
emphasis which is identical to Abrams’s version of the paradigm.Wolfson (), no less dubious about the New Critical paradigm, reconstitutes a ‘‘discourse of form,’’ which is alert to
ideological conflicts and to history. From a different angle and in another revision of Abrams,
Burwick () emphasizes the roots of German theory in Platonic and Aristotelian traditions
and points to the mimetic tensions between identity and difference that inform the Roman-
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Hyperion () is part of research that is intended to trace a decisive change
in the deployment of narrative modes in the long poem, a change that
concerns this paradigmatic shift. Earlier attempts, which focused on the
broader cultural context to explain it, have tended to mobilize either a timepoetics or a space-poetics in the service of an historical argument and have
located this shift in the transition from modernism to (post)modernism,
rather than in Romanticism.5 Yet other studies have tackled the problematic
poetics of the (post) Romantic long poem, while overlooking both the question of the long poem’s history as well as the specific model of temporality
that is implicit in its generic qualities.6
In its general orientation, my study of this genre is informed by the historical ideas of Wöfflin (), who argued for a classification of aesthetic
forms based on the modes of seeing and representing that are available in
different cultural phases, and the adaptation of Wöfflin’s ideas by Gilles
tic paradigm. In contrast to Abrams, Burwick’s paradigm is informed not by a replacement
of one set of norms by another but by the conflict between the objective form of imitation
and the subjectivity of its mediation, which is responsible for ‘‘Idem et Alter’’ (ibid.: ). See
also Eaves’s  study of the conflict between Romantic expressive norms and Blake’s emphasis on the role of the audience. The assumption that underlies my own work differs from
Abrams’s traditional version of this shift; it is closer to Todorov’s emphasis on the shift from
imitation to ‘‘production’’ (: –), together with an added emphasis not only on the
Romantic orientation toward an active reader (proposed by Wesling, Rajan, Wolfson, Eaves),
but on representation itself; hence my interest in time and space as axes of world and aesthetic
modeling. Assuming that Romantic poetry radically modifies mimesis, rather than dispensing with it altogether, the question becomes: In what ways do these modifications occur and
with what effects?
. See, for example, McHale’s  mapping of the transition from the ‘‘epistemological’’ to
the ‘‘ontological’’ dominant. I use McHale’s distinction in order to locate the beginning of
this paradigmatic shift in the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. By appeal
to a further historical distinction, Bell (: –) locates the shift from time to space in
mid-twentieth century culture. Jameson () accounts for the postmodernist shift in terms
of a space-time crisis. From a more specific study of narrative, Heise () likewise focuses
on the paradigmatic shift from modernism to (post)modernism.
. Within the limits of this essay it is not possible to discuss the scholarship on Romantic authors, some of which engages with the issue of time. To mention a few studies: for a phenomenological approach, see Hartman  and ; for a thematic emphasis, see Lindenberger
; for a rhetorical-figural emphasis, see de Man ; for a focus on the temporal mode of
coordinating images, see Wasserman ; and for a cognitive-prosodic orientation, see Wesling  and . It is worth noting, too, some pioneering work on the role of perception
within Romantic art: Arnheim  and Kroeber  (–). For a more general study of
Romanticism and time, Poulet (, ) is notable for his modernist-symbolist aesthetic
bias and is close in his approach to the lyricalizing tradition, to which I have alluded in note
. For a broader perspective, which locates the paradigmatic shift of time and space in the
transition to (post)modernism, see Bell ; on its historical roots in the Enlightenment, see
Lefebvre  and Harvey . For an exceptionally informative introduction to the history
of the modern long poem, see Bernstein  (–). For a recent perspective, not on the
long poem but on the transformations of Romanticism in postmodernisms, see Larrissy ;
with oblique relevance to the questions I discuss, see especially Bone  and Perloff .
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Deleuze (,  []) in his history of cinematic signs. I wish to demonstrate how the narrative strategies of the long poem coincide with transformations occurring in the last two hundred years or so, during which we
have come to represent and understand ourselves culturally through the
shaping of space and time. Accordingly, I have drawn on various studies
that argue for the cultural and historical basis of the observation, representation, and modeling of nature. Such studies have addressed the intertwining of bodily vision and movement in phenomenological perception (Ponty
: –), the emphasis on the new role of perception in the visual
arts (Arnheim ,  [], ), and the exposure of the limitations
of abstract Euclidean space (Serres ; Lefebvre : –, –). I
have also drawn on studies that propose new conceptual frames for viewing
the relationships between parts and wholes (Arnheim ; Deleuze 
[]; Serres ; Prigogine and Stengers ; Plotnitsky ).
Although most of these studies engage with different aspects of the dynamics of space, they all refer to a radical shift in philosophy, science,
and aesthetics that concerns time and perception. Serres (), Prigogine
and Stengers (), Hayles (), and others have argued that, beginning with the late nineteenth century, the study of thermodynamic systems
and probability physics brought time to science’s perception of the physical world in new ways. This involved a perception of irreversible Becoming
in opposition to the static image of Being depicted by Newton’s universal laws of motion.7 In relation to this image, Henri Bergson ( [],
 []) develops his own image of thought as internal movement and
his idea of memory as duration. This new interest in the conceptualization, interiorization, and representation of change had been anticipated by
the Romantic image of the world as an organism rather than as a rational machine, an image which evolved in thinkers as different as Schlegel,
Schelling, Schiller, and Coleridge. An important aspect of this new dynamic is the new relationship between the observer and the external field
upon which change materializes.8 Coleridge’s interest in the shift of focus
from mechanical to perspectivized motion is indicative of a new conceptu. Eichner () points to the contrast between the eighteenth-century emphasis on static
categories and the nineteenth-century interest in the dynamics of change. See also Lovejoy’s
focus (: –) on the temporalization of the Chain of Being and Gaull’s emphasis
(: –) on the questioning of its static aspect both by discoveries in the sciences and by
the poets’ reservations about mechanical approaches to the universe. Tracing the dynamics
of change back to seventeenth-century interest in the relationship between experience and
thought, Ernst Cassirer (: –) locates these changes in the new self-awareness of the
mind. See also Abrams  (–) and Todorov  (–).
. For historical background to the nineteenth-century model of vision, see Crary  (–
).
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alization of temporality that is shaped in poetic perception: ‘‘[W]hat we call
motion is our consciousness of motion, arising from the interruption of motion—the acting of the Soul resisted’’ (, : ). In considering such new
directions in aesthetic as well as scientific thinking, I argue that the poetics
of the long poem produce a concrete compositional equivalence of thought
in relation to time and process. The central question that informs my study
might be summed up as follows: Why and to what effect did space become
the focus of this paradigmatic shift in the composition of the long poem?
In my application of this question to temporal and spatial relationships
in the poetics of a genre, I will refer to the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and
Meir Sternberg.9 I accept Bakhtin’s (: ) assumption that each genre
manifests the ‘‘intrinsic connectedness’’ of temporal and spatial relationships. Taking this assumption further, I argue that space in the long poem
is the mode of organization that is most dependent on its deployment in
time. In considering the interaction between time and space as two dimensions of world as well as of composition that are intertwined in our perception, my argument is informed by two theoretical ideas adapted from Sternberg’s work on spatio-temporal dynamics. First, in his studies of narrative
and its theory (, ), of the art of description (), and of biblical
poetics (), Sternberg emphasizes the asymmetry between the medium
(which unfolds in time) and the object of narration (which extends in time
and space), and analyzes the implications of this asymmetry for representation and composition. Second, in his more recent theoretical writings on
time-space (, a, b, , ), he shows that strategies of signification and theories of time and space are functionally, historically, and
often ideologically based.
Sternberg’s emphasis on the interaction between time and space, in relation to representation and composition, constitutes a critique of theories
of signification in both aesthetics and literary theory, with a view to their
replacement by an integrated, multidimensional account. Ever since Kant
grounded epistemology in the perceiver, one might expect that the twin
conditions of perception—those of time and of space—would be viewed by
critical theory as necessary categories for organizing the world and consequently as necessary presuppositions of the reading process. However, criti. Like Lessing (: –), Bakhtin () also implies a hierarchy in which time’s role in
literature is more primary than space. Bakhtin’s view of literary history suggests, however,
that the relationship between the two elements varies in the poetics of different periods. In
my own emphasis on spatio-temporal structure throughout this work, I am indebted to Sternberg’s () formulation of the interaction between temporal unfolding and spatial integration. His formulation of the universals of spatio-temporal patterning in the text provides a
more extensive theoretical ground for describing historical variants.
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cal theory has tended to pose a choice between two distinct alternatives,
either a time- or a space-oriented approach.
Accordingly, the cultural history of modernism is often conceived of as
a problematic dichotomy between time and space. Thus as early as ,
Wyndham Lewis—supported by the practices of Pound, Eliot, and Joyce—
criticized the ‘‘time-philosophy’’ that he associated with Bergson’s notion
of ‘‘duration.’’ And in , in much the same spirit, Eliot himself equated
time-philosophy with the ‘‘laxities of Romanticism in literature’’ (Ellman
: ).10 Major trends in (post)modernist criticism later institutionalized
the mutual exclusivity of the time-space historical categorization. Daniel
Bell (: –), for example, claims that the organization of space has
become the primary aesthetic problem of mid-twentieth century culture, as
the problem of time was the primary aesthetic issue of the first decades of
this century. In reference to two specific periods, Marjorie Perloff ’s ()
remapping of modernism linked two poetical paradigms with distinct traditions and polar critical assumptions: Time is associated with the lyric
Romantic paradigm (Stevens), space with the narrative classical modernist
paradigm (Pound) (, –).11
Sternberg disputes such mutually exclusive claims (either time or space;
either the ‘‘what’’ as limited to the time or space of the world that is represented in the work, or the ‘‘how’’ of the work’s composition) in literary
theory. He analyzes how, since the beginning of the twentieth century, such
divisions have in their extreme form appeared to diminish the relevance
. At the same time, as antipole to modernist manifestoes and critical statements, the awareness of time as a dimension of culture and of composition played a vital role in the poetics of
both Eliot and Pound. See, for instance, Eliot’s (: ) emphasis on the ‘‘historical sense
of tradition,’’ and on its dynamic aspect—and, in a different context, his emphasis on meterdynamics as an aspect of the poet’s historicized personality or his focus on speech as an analogue of time (ibid.: ). In all these instances, he associates spatial patterns with temporal
functioning. Pound’s (: ) interest in time as the determinant composition is more direct
than Eliot’s: ‘‘The element most grossly omitted from treatises on harmony up to the present
is the element of Time.’’ Whereas Eliot’s interest lies in the links between the dynamization of
tradition and the possibilities of poetic medium, Pound stresses the correlation between the
possibilities of composition and what he perceives as the kinetic power of both emotion and
perception, hence his privileging of the noun that denotes action over a noun that separates
the subject from action, and his preference of line over color. (See Pound  and Ellmann
 [–]).
. Stevens’s own thinking on art counteracts such binary formulations. While his emphases
on ‘‘imagination,’’ ‘‘reality,’’ ‘‘consciousness,’’ and ‘‘vision’’ seem to conform to Perloff ’s distinction, some of his central insights in The Necessary Angel (: , ) overtly object to the
dichotomy between ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘content.’’ In the same vein, note also his concern with difficult wholes in ‘‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’’; with abstraction, form, and
parallelism in ‘‘Effects of Analogy’’ and in ‘‘The Relations between Poetry and Painting’’;
and his engagement with resemblance, difference, and structure in ‘‘Academic Pieces, I.’’
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of temporality and historicity within a modernist-oriented model. In literary theory, this shows both in the structuralist preference for universal and
timeless patterns and in formalistic attitudes to modernist texts. Accordingly, Roman Jakobson () deemphasized the axis of both discourse and
world as a sequence of signs, defining ‘‘equivalence’’ as the predominant
condition of poetic function; Joseph Frank and his followers, on the other
hand, have declared that modernism’s anti-Lessing poetics involve a shift
from temporal to ‘‘spatial form.’’ For Sternberg (b: ), on the contrary, narrative itself is fundamentally a ‘‘telling in time’’: ‘‘telling in time
is telling in a temporal medium, where all items and structures and effects
must unfold in an ordered sequence, as well as having to represent an eventsequence.’’ Given this sine qua non for verbal storytelling and accounting
for time and/or space theories from Aristotle through Lessing to recent narratology, Sternberg has argued that the preferences for, and objections to,
either spatializing (against the grain of the medium) or chronologizing (in
line with the medium) have functional roots or correlates, both in theory
and in practice.
Thus Lessing’s foregrounding of the temporality of representation, for
example, may be accounted for by his (neo-classical) interest in a peaceful
relation between the literary medium and its represented object—an interest that ‘‘lies not so much in the reader’s reconstruction as in the artist’s
construction of temporal art’’ (Sternberg a: ). Conversely, Sternberg
sees the modernist bias against the values associated with time as the basis
for Frank’s privileging emphasis on literature ‘‘as a simultaneous rather than
an unfolding whole’’ (ibid.: ), as is Jakobson’s more radical identification of poetic art with ‘‘systematic equivalence’’ rather than with sequence.
Sternberg’s analysis of narrative and aesthetic theories, by contrast, pinpoints the relation between the two senses of space and their dependence
on time.
Space unfolds on two axes, mimetic and analogical (Sternberg ). On
the first, represented details, situations, places, and characters are linked
through principles of life-like coexistence and contiguity: the patterning
of space works ‘‘horizontally.’’ On the second, space is constructed ‘‘vertically’’ or analogically, through the repetition of a common feature (existential or linguistic) that operates as a basis not only for suprasequential
grouping, but also for sequential transition and continuity (Sternberg ,
). Through comparison and differentiation, analogy detaches objects
(figures, gestures, scenes) from mimetic space and reorganizes them in a
new ensemble. In this manner analogical space may link the local detail and
the disconnected scene to the moving whole. In both of its manifestations,
space cannot unfold except from moment to moment along the verbal se-
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quence. But in the practice of narrative poetry, which not only extends in
time but consists of an interplay between the order in which events have (or
are supposed to have) occurred and the order of the discourse that reflects
them, this constraint is all the more prominent.
Keats’s Hyperion develops predominantly along the dimension of space
and consequently commits itself to the conflict between the spatial object
and the verbal medium. Its changing hierarchy between those two axes of
world and composition (mimetic and analogical space) interacts with distinct shapes of temporality. My argument will explore how they interact
and to what effects.
Hyperion: From Time to Space
The early reception of Hyperion as ‘‘the greatest of poetical Torsos’’ (Gilfillan
; cited in Scott : ) alludes to its historical role in the crisis of the
poetry of action and movement.12 Time is marked by the crucial gaps that
Keats leaves in the narrative chronology, by his repetition of almost identical scenes, and by his interruption of the poem with the unfulfilled event
that supposedly triggers its entire plot (the deification of the would-be poet).
This radical dissolution of linear action can be viewed as a specific manifestation of Keats’s well-known Miltonic anxiety (‘‘[W]hat would be life for
him would be death for me’’ [, :]): Keats mediates the classical
narrative of the revolt of the Olympians via the allusion to Paradise Lost.13
. Hyperion’s reception is an extreme case of the general critical trend, which views Keats’s
descriptive priority as an impediment to the narrative action of his long poems. See Jack
, Bate , Fischer’s (: –) citation of contemporary reviewers, Scott  (),
and Zeff ’s () summary. Most of these emphasize the stasis of Keats’s narrative. In fact,
the use of time and especially space has been recognized in Keats’s work. This recognition
has not focused on the interaction or relation to the narrative, but to his thought, theme,
language, or genre. See, for instance, Bell’s () emphasis on the thematization of space in
Keats’s use of language and Aske’s (: –) view of the static descriptions as representations of past epic fiction. Seider’s () recent Bakhtinian reading of the Hyperion poems,
in its emphasis on Keats’s revision of the Miltonic chronotope, is exceptional in this context.
. The contrast Keats draws between Chatterton and Milton is followed by his telling distinction between the poetry of art and the poetry of life; Keats (, : ), accordingly,
differentiates his own artistic ends from those of Milton: ‘‘Miltonic verse cannot be written
but in the vein of art—I wish to devote myself to another sensation.’’ The emphasis upon
Keats’s ‘‘anxiety’’ in relation to Milton begins with Bate (, ) and Harold Bloom ().
Sperry () focuses on Hyperion’s stylistic indebtedness to Milton but argues for The Fall’s
adherence to Milton’s myth of suffering and redemption. Elaborating on Bloom, Brisman
(, ) on the other hand, emphasizes verbal and thematic departures from Milton,
rather than ‘‘anxieties.’’ Goslee () focuses on the dislocation of Miltonic action and on
Keats’s counterstrategies of representation. See also her  commentary on Keats’s notes
to Paradise Lost; and compare Lau  on the notes in Keats’s  edition of Paradise Lost,
to the effect that their emphasis falls on descriptive passages and on perspectival position-
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At the same time, he renders the narrative of the fall—including the expulsion from Eden and the consequent gain of knowledge—from the viewpoint
of the fictional contemporary poet who reinvents it. His narrative imports
into his ancient models more recent elements: poetic, psychological, perceptual, multigeneric, and multimedial elements. Keats’s new emphases
typify his experiments in objectifying his intuitions about the relationship
between history and present experience and art and its reception. Abandoning Milton’s cosmic outlook on history, Keats sought a perspective in which
the present is conceived as absorbing both past and future.14 His adaptation
of the epic also shifts the center of interest from the epic events to the time
when they can be both mediated and reexperienced as art.While Milton still
constructs the illusion of time predominantly on the basis of externalized
action, Keats works to break this illusion. The action in Paradise Lost moves
from the fall of Satan and Adam backward in time through the speech of
Raphael and forward through the speech of Michael, to the beginning and
end of human history; the action in Hyperion, however, is reduced to an amplified (lyrical) moment, the duration of which is that of the real time it
takes to read the text.
Accordingly, unlike its diverse models (such as Hesiod’s theogony, the
Dantesque and Miltonic epic, the Wordsworthian autobiography), which
establish some line of chronology and/or causality, the poem radically perspectivizes time, either telescoping or amplifying it (see section ). Nor does
the plot consist, as it might, in the struggle between the three godheads.
Rather, it takes the war as finished: Saturn has already fallen, Hyperion is
doomed to fall, and Apollo’s deification coincides with the fall of the others.
The poem is consequently organized around three narrative states that
create an unfulfilled expectation of movement, culminating in the poem’s
abrupt break at the very point where Apollo’s gesture is frozen amidst his
agonized ‘‘shriek,’’ before his bodily metamorphosis is fulfilled. The cessation of both Hyperion poems in midsentence, before this central event is
realized, sharpens the antinarrative effect.
Because Keats’s protagonists—the fallen Titans, Apollo, and the naring. Both Goslee’s and Lau’s intertextual readings confirm my own view that Keats’s struggle
with Milton involved generic and compositional choices as much as stylistic ones. Aiming for
this wider scope, I have emphasized the relationship between Keats’s changing attitude to
time and history and the central role of generic options in his poetic development (Lachman
: –). For the changing role of genre in his evolution, compare Bate  (especially
–); Rajan ; Vendler ; and Levinson .
. As Keats draws upon Milton’s own relativization of epic cosmology, what I present here
as a radical inversion of Miltonic structure constitutes more of a development than a simple
reversal. For a recent study which emphasizes Milton’s relativization of time and space, regarding religious allegory and the epic, see Martin  (–).
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rator of The Fall of Hyperion—do not take part in the shaping of historical action, they can only compete for the ‘‘knowledge enormous’’ of their
existential state. Hence the poem’s epistemological emphasis: the action
involved seems a process of seeking (without satisfactorily gaining) knowledge. The starting point for plot movement is Saturn’s awakening from his
frozen sleep to the knowledge of human misery: ‘‘[H]is kingdom gone /
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place’’ (.–). The poem’s cessation point is Apollo’s deification, which is supposedly attained by transformation through knowledge but is in fact interrupted and presented by the
protagonist himself as a vast widening of vision (.–).
The epistemological emphasis keeps changing and broadening with
Hyperion’s shifts between divergent angles of visions. Within the amplified
moment that is the duration of his narrative, numerous speech acts and
physical movements replace the expected action. The world shrinks into a
structure of voices (.–) and their visual equivalents in limited physical
movements, such as rising, lifting, sitting; gestures as empty as Hyperion’s
dramatic entrances and exits (.–). Keats combines various points of
view that perspectivize time. Accordingly, the Titans’ nostalgic outlook on
life suggests that what is being related is not the events themselves, but the
memory of them. The attempt to resurrect some lost ancient wholeness is
presented to the reader as a temporal series consisting of a rich past, a nostalgic present, and an empty future.
In addition to this downplaying of time, the causality that traditionally
has been associated with temporal sequence in the epic is disrupted by
the predominance of both mimetic and analogical space, which block the
progression of the plot and instead focus on the protagonists’ acts of seeing, hearing, and speaking. The causal links that might establish a connection between successive points in time are elided, and consequently it
is never very clear just why Saturn fell or what led to Hyperion’s ascent
to the throne. If Apollo is an adequate godhead, why isn’t his deification
fulfilled in the poem? The poem begins in medias res and then slides from
one cultural phase to the other, never fully specifying the causes of this
progress. At various points Keats goes back to the past (Saturn .–,
.–; Coelis .–; Oceanus .–). The antecedent information is disclosed retrospectively, so as to suggest divergent accounts of the
myth of creation and/or fall. The interest lies in the fictional versions constructed by the mythical figures—rather than in the actual cause and course
of events—so that our reconstruction of the myth focuses on the parallels
and contrasts among its partial versions. Keats’s orchestration of ‘‘debate,
quarrel and questioning’’ (Wolfson : ) enhances narrative interest
by foregrounding the gaps that emerge from omissions of causal links; at the
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same time, however, this orchestration highlights the difficulty of making
sense of Hyperion’s world. All this places an extra burden on the reader, who
changes into an active spectator, animating this semimythic theater where
half-human sculptures await, interpret, and witness the passing of time.
In its radical attitude toward classical action, Hyperion, therefore, shifts
from a conventional historical plot to a failed epistemological quest. By
reorganizing his narrative so that its emphasis falls on multiple metamorphoses of mimetic space (imaginary scenes, objects of art, figures, identities,
forms, and media), Keats also extends his narrative’s center of interest from
epistemology to ontology and to its representation in art. Consequently,
mimetic space becomes a substitute, rather than a background, for action:
instead of the expected dynamics of epic plot, we encounter frozen historical moments, analogous to the Titans themselves: ‘‘Scarce images of life,’’
‘‘[C]rampt and screwed / without a motion’’ (H ., –). This usurpation of space is also evident in the poem’s macro-organization: instead
of leading to any resolution in the action, its unfulfilled metamorphic episodes are repeated in the various states that recur within different dramatized spatial contexts. An immobile vale below the surface of the earth, a
twilight palace flushed in sunset from its basements to its high towers, and a
seashore opposite an island—all these become panoramic tableaux within
which Keats erects his human statues, incarnating them in rich forms, via
allusions to reliefs, sculptures, theater, painting, and music.These tableaux,
which represent scenes that occur at different times, are all telescoped into a
mental ‘‘now’’: either after the fall (of Saturn), during the fall (of Hyperion),
or before the deification (of Apollo).
The shocking effect of this truncation is evident in early readers’ responses to the poem. They likened it to ‘‘a ruin in the desert,’’ ‘‘the bones
of the mastodon,’’ and a ‘‘magnificent mutilation.’’ 15 Later responses to the
poem can be divided between those who held narrative expectations of the
genre, as did Keats’s contemporaries, and others who inherited its lyrical
canonization from a modernist tradition that goes back through William K.
Wimsatt, A. C. Bradley, and E. A. Poe to Hazlitt and John Stuart Mill.16
The former group, who expected Hyperion ‘‘to be a narrative poem’’ and
found that ‘‘it is nothing of the kind’’ (Havens : , –), emphasized the gap between the ‘‘noble description’’ and the fact that ‘‘nothing
. George Gilfillan, cited in Hill  (–) and in Scott  ().
. For the historical background of this lyric trend, see Bernstein  (–); also, see Wolfson’s () review of the ambivalence attributed to ‘‘form’’ within this tradition. For the modernist overprivileging of the lyric, see also Wolfson  (–). For a new contextualization
of Romantic lyric, see Rajan’s () questioning of the status of both organic models and
the privileging of the lyric paradigm. See also Rajan  and Scott  ().
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really happens.’’ This expectation of a traditional narrative is shared by
readers of the last decades, such as Little, who discusses the lack of action
in the poem (: –), and Bennett, who more recently diagnosed the
‘‘stunted narrative forms’’ (: ) as ‘‘failures of narrative transition’’
(). Critics such as Bush (: ) and Scott (), whose Hyperion belongs in the lyric tradition, treated the lure of the image as compensation
for the absence of a ‘‘real’’ story, vivacity of characters, and engaging incidents. Scott’s words (: ) on Endymion, in particular, capture the more
general ekphrastic motive he ascribes to Keats and by which he accounts
for the apparent stasis of the latter’s narrative: ‘‘A gallery of delights, more
a pastiche of discrete aesthetic moments than a fluid narrative, more museum than tale.’’ Even the few who went deeper into the poem’s generic
reshuffle viewed Keats’s odd shaping of epic materials as a vehicle for Hyperion’s lyricalization (Hartman : ; Wolfson : ; Lau ). For
most readers, then, whether explicitly or implicitly, whether from a hostile or a complimentary perspective, Keats’ violation of the epic model has
been interpreted as the breakdown of narrativity itself.17
But, paradoxically, it is the long poem’s reception as a series of bright pictures, abstracted and symbolic, or as metaphors without expressed tenors
(Wimsatt ), that draws attention to questions of its narrativity.18 By
organizing the composition of the poem around a predominantly spatial
rather than temporal order, Keats (like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other
Romantics), sharpens the asymmetry between the object and genre of representation (poetic description) and its telling in a temporal medium (narrative poetry), ‘‘where all items and structures and effects must unfold in an
ordered sequence’’ (Sternberg b: ). In response to this question of
interaction between lyric description and narrative poetry, Coleridge (
[], :) asserted that a long poem ‘‘neither can nor ought to be all
. In twentieth-century Romantic criticism, conventional narration comes under attack
from various sides; examples include the lyricalization of the long poem (Abrams ), the
Romantic privileging of the fragment (McFarland ; Levinson ; Beer : –),
Romantic new interpretations of the neo-classical genre system (Curran ), and the divided poetics of both Romantic aesthetics and ideology of form (Wolfson ). Compared
with these, predominantly binary thinking of narrative and lyric, only a few critics have explored how the apparent reversion to narrative norms renders perceptible the novelty of narrative and/or reading strategies. See, for example, Rajan’s () emphasis on the reader’s
role, on Romantic hermeneutics, and on its significance for Romantic narrative strategies
() and Lockridge’s insights () regarding the interaction between ethic complexities
and their narrative manifestations. For a different perspective, compare Fischer’s () historical emphasis and my own focus on the narrativization of space (Lachman ).
. The foregrounding of image details at the expense of plot has become an accepted norm
in relation to the modern verse epic: for instance, see Kenner (: ) on ‘‘the method of
Luminous Detail,’’ which is characteristic of Pound’s aesthetics in the Cantos.
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poetry,’’ and thus proposed that the limiting lyricalizing equivalence between a poem and ‘‘poetry’’ should be broken.19 On the other hand, Poe’s
radical verdict on the suicidal practice of this genre problematizes the consequences of its liberation as recommended by Coleridge and practiced by
the Romantics. The view of the long poem as an oxymoron, an anachronism, and an offence to art (Poe  []) highlights the question that
emerges from Romantic practice: How do we account for this apparent
violation of narrative norms?
The Shape of Time: (Dis)continuity, Movement, Duration
This violation of narrative norms not only defies the (neo)classical hierarchy that subjects description to narration but is also part of Keats’s effort
to imagine experience and art in a coexistence that is not peaceful, either
poetically or aesthetically.20 On the one hand, in Keats’s poetic theory (as
it emerges from his letters and poetry), lived experience is constantly measured against what it can inspire in art or according to what aspects of literary history it repeats. On the other hand, by running against the logic
of classical composition, Keats not only displaces reality from an everyday context into an artistic framework, he attempts to reinvent civilization, thereby bringing sensation to life itself and experiencing life anew.
This mutual interaction between art and experience largely shapes the
contrast between his aesthetic theory and developing poetic practice. His
early theory allows the poet to play with light and shade without being
affected by them, and his view of poetry as a ‘‘Pleasure Thermometre’’
(, :, –) evaporates ‘‘disagreeables’’ and leads through gradations of happiness to a new mode of (impersonal) dramatic representation. Both these concepts favor mimetic and ‘‘naive’’ modes of representation. Central to Keats aesthetics is the idea of the ‘‘natural object’’ and
of ‘‘poetic objectivity’’ that aspires to unmediated mimetic illusion. But
such privileging of ‘‘naive’’ and ‘‘transparent’’ modes of representation is
. Shelley (: –) makes a similar distinction between the poetic quality of parts of a
composition and a ‘‘poem.’’ For a historical perspective, see Hazlitt’s admiration for the predominant role of the pictorial in Milton’s narrative (cited in Lau : –). For a modern
theoretical perspective, see Sternberg : ‘‘actional and descriptive discourse form a polar,
rather than an ungradable contrast’’ (). For the interaction of the representational poles in
ekphrasis, often against ekphrastic theory, see Yacobi .
. Vendler (: ) presents ‘‘To Autumn’’ as an apex of such coexistence between art
and experience. From a more theoretical perspective oriented to German philosophy, Rajan
(: –) exposes this difficult coexistence by pointing to the tension between Keats’s
theory and his narrative practice, mainly in parallel to Schiller’s conflict between the ‘‘naive’’
and the ‘‘sentimental’’ or to Nietzsche’s ‘‘dialogue of Apollo and Dionysos.’’ To my mind,
Keats’s spatio-temporal poetics adds a new perspective on this encounter.
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repeatedly questioned by Keats’s practice. In temporalizing the classical
past (object/world/myth/form) and in his self-aware attitude to his temporal medium, his poetics reveal a curious mutual dependency between art
and experience.
As my brief analysis of Hyperion’s plot indicates, Keats’s composition is
modeled on the concept of civilization not merely as a canon, but as a way
of translating and transmitting memory. Both Hyperion: A Fragment and The
Fall of Hyperion: A Dream revolve around the theme of dynastic succession.
The question of who the appropriate successor will be is overtly dramatized
in the Titans’ council in book two (which, as various critics have pointed
out, is modeled on the debate in Pandemonium in book two of Paradise Lost).
Oceanus’s oft-quoted speech announces his credo: ‘‘And first, as thou wast
not the first of powers, / So art thou not the last; it cannot be: Thou art not
the beginning nor the end’’ (H .–). Keats further problematizes these
ideas by constructing his narrative as a confrontation between the Olympians and the fallen Titans and as a contrastive comparison between the
three candidates for godhood, thereby shifting the emphasis from succession to coexistence. The titles themselves foreground the issue of succession
with regard to history, genesis, genre, and ontology. (From what whole is
this fragment? From classical antiquity? From the classical epic? From an
archaeological museum and/or any of its items? From a personal dream
vision? Or from Keats’s own unfulfilled complete poem? Or perhaps the
title evokes the archaeological ruin upon which Hyperion is modeled.)
The Hellenic fragment, like his well-known Grecian Urn, is reinvented
by John Keats, a schoolboy ‘‘with face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop
window,’’ as Yeats described him.21 What at first appears to be an authentic ‘‘fragment’’ of Hellenism in Hyperion is revised by Keats in his sequel
poem, The Fall of Hyperion, as a ‘‘dream-vision’’—a sentimental construct by
a ‘‘blushing poet’’ (Ricks : –) who belonged to the Cockney school
of poetry, whose Homer was Chapman, whose Dante was Cary, whose Boccaccio was Englished, and whose education was largely based on engravings and reproductions.22 This fragment is not merely a simulation of the
classical object, but a layered modernized construct that orchestrates the
. ‘‘Ego Dominus Tuus,’’ .–. Cited by Rajan (: ).
. For an attempt to account for Keats’s style, particularly its parodic aspects, by appeal to
the poet’s lack of control over the sociocultural code, see Levinson  (–). In his biography of Keats, Motion () embraces the Romantic view that Keats’s poetry was an escape
route from a life which was denied to him; Levinson emphasizes that ‘‘what was, initially, a
substitute for a grim life became for Keats a substitute life: a real life of substitute things—
simulacra’’ (: ). In what follows, the analysis of the shapes of time and especially their
transfer to composition will, I hope, bring out the distinctive features of Keats’s mediating
and mediated narrative form.
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quarrel over the adequate candidate for canonization. Hyperion focuses on
the artistic revision of a mythic struggle by staging the voices that debate
the conflict between the Olympians and the fallen Titans in terms of the
contrasts between past and present; The Fall of Hyperion, on the other hand,
revises Keats’s own ‘‘shapes of epic greatness’’ (Keats , :) by rereading the apparently naive assertions of Hyperion and reinscribing them
sentimentally into the poet’s own reflexive dream. Both poems are linked,
as Levinson (: ) points out, to Keats’s ‘‘alienated access to the canon’’
and, I would add, to his attempt at self-legitimization through his reading,
translating, and reexperiencing the forms of classicism in a temporalized
perspective.
The very composition of his sequel poem, itself fragmentary, encapsulates the difficulty of succession that is foregrounded by the plot, by the title,
and by Keats’s revision not just of the ancient myth via Milton (or Milton
via the ancient myth), but of his own poem Hyperion. In light of my partial analysis of the poem’s plot, the very fact that Hyperion does not solve
the question of succession on the level of action, but rather foregrounds
it through composition and re-vision, points to the issue of time as crucial to an understanding of Keats’s critique of naive (Apollonian) modes of
art. Two effects of his use of sequence particularly estrange our perception
of time:
. The change in the proportion between world (represented) and discourse (representational) time. Against epic norm, Keats condenses the epic action into a
fragment that remains within a single and extended moment. It comprises
different time scales: from aeons of political and spiritual history telescoped
in a panoramic tableau of an archaic god and condensed in the hollow brain
of ‘‘the Father of all verse’’ in Hyperion (.) to the present moment of the
poet’s dream, which displaces narrative interest to the portrait of Moneta’s
face, in The Fall of Hyperion. In its turn, the act of retelling his vision is remeasured in his sequel poem by the length of time it would take the dreamer to
ascend the marble steps of ‘‘an old sanctuary’’ (FH ) before the priestess,
Moneta, finished burning the sacred leaves, and to recount his dream. This
remeasurement dramatizes anew the question of re-presentation and foregrounds the difficulty of sequencing such re-presentation. Keats not only
frames traces of the historical past within a personal dream that, as Scott
(: –) has pointed out, itself embeds ‘‘a mythological rendering of
the British museum,’’ but re-presents an entire fragment of his own fragmented text (FH .–, –). The vision of Saturn and Thea is displaced from Keats’s previous text to Moneta’s brain, evoked as ‘‘frozen effigies’’ and read by the poet in The Fall. Consequently, the same moment
leads to different, alternative, and even mutually exclusive temporalities.
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To use Keats’s (, :) own understatement, ‘‘A long day may be
a short year’’ in this transfer from one time-frame to another; within the
space of a few lines, however, calamities pass. Long historical periods
undergo radical fragmentation. At the same time, conversely, the focus of
the viewer’s gaze on an object or any of its parts, which in reality might last a
fraction of a second, receives long exposure. In this way, Keats foregrounds
the dissonance between the brief instant of a limited physical movement
and the lengthy description that amplifies it (H .–).
. Foregrounding discourse time on various levels. In the macro-structure, as already argued, Keats chooses the strongest and most strategic cutoff points
along the sequence. Opening late in medias res, at a moment when Saturn
is already fallen, Keats greets us with an image of aging and death; closing
at a point that Apollo is about to be deified, he leaves us with an image of an
anticipated birth. Both moments run counter to our expectations of order
in life and in narrative: the sudden beginning plays on our ignorance about
all that preceded it, while the abrupt point of closure leaves the reader in
the dark about the future. Framing his narrative with two tableaux that recall Lessing’s pregnant moments (the first deadly silent, before awakening;
the second in midst of a cry), he also freezes the opening movement that
promises to flow and omits the fulfillment when we most expect closure.
This effect not only undermines mimesis by displacing the reader’s interest
from the event to its staging (and consequently to its perception and reconstruction), but, as we shall see, it also makes the reader hesitate between
different ontological levels.
At either of these junctures, the effect of the sequence is reinforced by
Keats’s treatment of the micro-level. Yet the cutoff point gains exceptional
perceptibility in the poem’s final sentence by means of a daring nonconformity between the event and its wording: ‘‘During the pain Mnemosyne
held / Her arms as one who prophesied—At length / Apollo shriek’d—
and lo! from all his limbs / Celestial * * * * * * * * * * ’’ (H .–). The sentence consists of two unfinished sequences that are implicitly subordinated.
Keats leaves each of these embeddings in a suspended state: Mnemosyne
extending her arms as if she were a midwife in midst of labor, her prophesy unfulfilled; Apollo freezing ‘‘during the pain’’ in the midst of his own
shriek.Teasing our desire for closure, Keats intensifies the tension at its apex
and breaks the narrative in midsentence, where Apollo’s anticipated deification is interrupted by a series of asterisks. The fact that Apollo’s metamorphosis began to take place with the aid of music, a nonrepresentational
art (H .–), is almost fulfilled by means of bodily gestures (the goddess
‘‘held / Her arms as one who prophesied’’; the god ‘‘shrieked’’), and is finally
frustrated by an asterisked interruption, I read as another sign of Keats’s
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struggle to re-present the unrepresentable. In complete nonconformity to
Lessing’s recommendation of a transparent relationship between the signifier and the signified, Keats frustrates our expectation of the birth of a god
by causing us to return from the signified to the signifier, from reality to the
language that represents it. He leaves the reader with a narrative that is still
to be completed.
In accord with the descriptive tendency throughout, he ends with the adjective ‘‘celestial,’’ thus delaying not only the verb but even the noun to an
uncertain and unfulfilled future. Instead of subjecting description to action,
as is the case in Homer and in Virgil, Keats defamiliarizes the adjective
and lingers on it. Precisely in this delay of action, in the suspended syntax (H .–), the emphasis shifts from the event to the moment of its
perception and to the extension of this moment in represented space.
As in the poem’s action, where Keats creates simultaneity by distorting
the represented sequence, so in the description of the static on the microlevel, Keats twists the word sequence. Here, too, together with the dissonance between the brief instant of a limited physical movement and the
lengthy description that amplifies it (H .–), Keats foregrounds the
choices he makes as to where to cut, to begin, to end, or to continue, thereby
affecting the reader’s sense of (dis)continuity, completion, and time. The
point at which the phrase or the segment is cut usually leads us from the
figure in the background to a close-up of its pose, movement, or synecdochic
parts, thereby determining the distance and the direction of our focus as
well as how we translate its movement into duration.
All these devices, which draw attention to communication time, point to
Keats’s transfer of attention from the classical object to the contemporary
spectator. On the level of narration and genre, the viewpoint, in particular, highlights the shift from the expected movement of classical plot to the
reader’s consciousness of movement itself. Perhaps that is why, throughout
Hyperion, Keats explores the possibility that movement, whenever it occurs,
can be tested by its opposite (i.e., stasis). One example is the poem’s opening scene, in which the viewer’s awareness of ancient Saturn slowly evolves
in time:23
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
. See Vendler’s (: –) analysis of the contrast in this passage between nostalgic
memory and aesthetic transformation.
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Like cloud on cloud.
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips . . .
(H .–)
As in ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ Keats creates an unexpected balance between the impression of stasis that pervades the silent tableau and the dynamics of reading it as a verbal text.
Our attention is at first caught by the image of ancient Saturn, whose
isolated compactness displays the symbolism of timelessness as its theme:
silent, still, sunken, and stonelike, far from all signs of human time, in a
vale where nature is frozen into artificiality.The description carries an acute
sense of temporal irreversibility that freezes movement into the stasis of
‘‘space.’’ Our impression of stasis is reinforced because Keats does not follow
Lessing’s ideal of the Homeric narrativized descriptive method. Unlike the
scenes that are depicted on Achilles’ shield, the sharply defined elements of
the figure—Saturn’s head or the Naiad’s cold finger—are not immediately
mobilized for plot but are instead fixed in death.
This first scene, however, already marks the tension between the impression of a timeless and ‘‘naive’’ mode of existence and the repressed temporality that it conveys. The timeless properties of the bower in which the
god is located are perceived negatively in relation to change (‘‘morn,’’ ‘‘fiery
noon,’’ and ‘‘eve’s one star’’). Likewise, Saturn is depicted not explicitly, in
the form of a statue, but by analogy to a statue ‘‘quiet as a stone,’’ in a state
which gradually reveals itself as a negation of health, light, heat, music,
speech, and youth. Its frozen aspects are identified negatively in relation to
a former identity (‘‘nerveless,’’ ‘‘listless,’’ ‘‘unsceptered,’’ ‘‘realmless’’).
Keats draws on the spatio-temporal resources of language in order to
underline the conflict between an immobile mimetic object and the temporality inherent in its mediation. On the one hand, he deploys the first
syntactical unit, for example, or the multiple and foregrounded adverbial
markers of place, in order to reproduce the static figure with minute fidelity.
Prepositions and deixis such as ‘‘round about,’’ ‘‘above,’’ ‘‘mid,’’ ‘‘closer,’’
‘‘where,’’ and ‘‘there’’ effectively delineate the spatial plane. At the same
time, however, these very markers affect the order in which we either perceive or reconstruct the object in space. Moreover, this apparently static
image cannot unfold except from moment to moment along the verbal se-
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quence. By means of the ordering and the repetition of the three adverbial clauses (‘‘Deep in the shady sadness,’’ ‘‘Far sunken,’’ ‘‘Far from the fiery
noon’’) that build upon one another, Keats gives prominence to the act of
locating the scene in space and in time. Subjecting the image (‘‘gray-hair’d
Saturn’’) to perspectivization, Keats (, : –)—to borrow his own
insight about Milton—‘‘is not content with simple description, he must station.’’ Just as Milton positions his birds, very accurately, ‘‘under a cloud in
prospect,’’ or places Satan ‘‘disfigured—on the Assyrian Mount’’ (ibid.), so
Keats carefully locates Saturn ‘‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale’’ (H .).
But as opposed to Milton’s life-like representation, Keats de-emphasizes
the represented object and foregrounds its unstable perspectivization.24
Among the devices employed here is the conversion of spatial into serial
priority, shaping the depiction that at first appeared static, as it unfolds
from depth to surface, from low to high view, from (the negation of ) light
to (the negation of ) darkness, from utter silence to the verge of speech, and
from distance to proximity.While the distance between the observer and the
image is implied in the framing of Saturn, isolated ‘‘[d]eep in the shady sadness of a vale,’’ the language of the description increasingly bears the stamp
of a narrator who is distant, yet not untouched by the object he envisages.
The bower in which Saturn is stationed is tinged not only with pictorial
chiaroscuro, but also with a shade of emotion projected by this human beholder, who locates the ancient marble-god ‘‘[d]eep in the shady sadness of
a vale.’’ Throughout Hyperion the boundary between the static artwork and
the living person advances and recedes, depending on whether we choose
to concentrate on the distant framing of the whole or on the close-up of
its distorted part, on the visual allusions or on their verbal translation, on
the irreversibility of verbal arrangement or on its narrative and semantic
implications.
Together with the perceptual ordering, the reader is impelled to narrativize the image. A sense of the lapse of time is created by the tension between the timeless image (‘‘Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone’’) and
the reader’s interpretive movement across the signs that constitute it: the
reader moves from the allusion to the god’s posture, to the gray that connotes either the god’s old age or the materiality of the relieflike description, to the image of a hair that it evokes, then from the hair to the hypothesis that this signifies a humanized stone statue, then to the subtlety
of the statue’s expression or shape, and from these to the absoluteness of
. Augustus Schlegel (, :–) emphasizes perspectivity in the ‘‘picturesque.’’ See
Goslee’s (: –) analysis of perception and reflected perception in Hyperion, in the context of the ‘‘picturesque,’’ and her discussion of this Keatsian note to Paradise Lost (, :
–).
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temporal irreversibility. During the reading process we thus come to understand, firstly, that this ancient god, who is commonly identified with the
Greek Chronus (Time) and is often celebrated by poets as a representative
of a ‘‘Golden Age,’’ appears here as a belated and nostalgic persona from
a former Eden and is waiting to be awakened from his mythological sleep.
Secondly, we gradually notice that Keats re-presents the god that the sculptor represented, constructing him in a manner that retards both the poem’s
action (as noted above in section ) and its narration.
This advance from mimesis to its perspectivization is rendered perceptible by Keats’s careful translation of the verbal signs into relationships in
space. Even the past tense verbs, such as ‘‘sat,’’ ‘‘hung,’’ ‘‘fell,’’ and ‘‘did rest,’’
invite us to recreate a state rather than a series of actions. Particularly salient
is the main verb (‘‘sat’’), which is delayed to the fourth line of the passage
and absorbed into the context of multiple adjectives and adverbs that enhance its descriptive function. Furthermore, the name Saturn appears as a
pun or variation on the verb ‘‘sat’’ and hence becomes a particularly apt icon
for its static aspect. The echo of this name is reinforced by the repetition of
the sound ‘‘st’’ in the words that denote stillness (‘‘stone’’ and ‘‘[s]till’’), but
also surfaces in one of the prominent sound chains that shape this entire
passage (‘‘star,’’ ‘‘[s]at,’’ ‘‘Saturn,’’ ‘‘stone,’’ ‘‘stir,’’ ‘‘[f ]orest’’). Out of the letters of ‘‘sat,’’ the text thus generates a phonological matrix that literalizes
and detemporalizes the central theme of the poem, (de)thronement.
Accordingly, the action would seem as static as this initial posture of the
motionless god were it not for Keats’s emphatic engagement of the reader
in the transition via words to the image, from the image to its perception,
to its implicit narrative, and to its subsequent staging. Hyperion’s first scene
already energizes the above depiction, highlighting changes in mode and
level of existence. The disruption of the aesthetic frame that the reader has
constructed by reference to the model of sculpture culminates in the narrative shift from the distanced description of Saturn’s statuesque features
(head, old right hand, closed eyes) to the close-up on Thea’s face and the
narrator’s expressive shift of gears: ‘‘But oh! how unlike marble was that
face’’ (.). The emotional ‘‘reading’’ of Thea’s face from a temporal perspective works against the atemporal aesthetic effect of its initial comparison to a ‘‘Memphian sphinx.’’ The poet reads in the sphinx’s face the human
expression of ‘‘sorrow’’ and ‘‘calamity’’ (.–), as if it were a mirror that
anticipates the doom of the fallen gods. To humanize the marble face is to
temporalize it through its own ability to ‘‘read’’ human history.25
. For the kinship between Keats’s portraitlike focus upon facial expression and Schlegel’s
concept of the ‘‘picturesque,’’ see Goslee . On the role of facial expression in the poems,
see also Mellor  and Vendler  (–).
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Keats’s interest in a modernized reading of the past can be further illuminated by reference to Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ (), an essay in which Benjamin
links the acceleration of the photograph’s exposure time with the evaporation of ‘‘aura’’ from the image. This ‘‘uniqueness of the work of art’’ (ibid.:
)—a singularity in time and space, which is the hallmark of its authenticity—declines with the gradual detachment of modern art from its ritualistic basis, a process that starts in the Renaissance, intensifies with the
advent of photography in the nineteenth century, and is radicalized with
the mechanical reproduction of art in the twentieth century. This ‘‘decline
of the aura’’ to which Benjamin points seems relevant to the reproduction
that is characteristic of the Romantic mediation of classicism and of Keats’s
poetry in particular. The new goals of description become the perception
of time and the representation of perception. Here the original ‘‘aura’’ of
the object is replaced by its individual construction, which is assembled by
the new, modern observer. Drawing on Benjamin, we might say that Keats
activates long ‘‘intervals of exposure,’’ which substitute a plurality of duplications, copies, and perspectives for a unique original; the singularity in
time and space on which a Greek myth, an Egyptian sculpture, or a Hellenic fragment depend for their claim to authority and authenticity is now
replaced by its modern perspectivization.
A parallel substitution of the ‘‘authentic’’ classical locus by its modernized reproduction is manifest in Keats’s macro-organization. Keats reconstructs his evolutionary ontology along the lines of classical memory systems, by designing locations for the major events. At the same time, as
he did in the local segments, he employs perspective to temporalize and
thereby reproduce the ahistorical mythic space. The landscape is mythical in the sense that it is at least partly figured within a huge and empty
space, rather than in a confined human environment. The division of this
continuous whole into spatial units partly motivates the segmentation of
the text, where each scene or segment centers around a specifically defined,
localized space (Saturn’s vale; Hyperion’s sun-palace; the Titans’ ‘‘nest of
woe’’; Apollo’s enchanted island), rather than an event.26 The fact that the
links between the text-segments are grounded in spatial continuity, contiguity, parallelism, together with the fullness of visual detail, manifests the
centrality of these spatial units within the composition.
The duplication of the represented space by other texts and mediums
. I draw on Hrushovski’s () principles of narrative segmentation, but I explore their
role in the construction of the text’s time experience.
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proceeds as these visualized locations lose their mythological and geographical meaning and are re-framed. Hyperion’s ‘‘palace bright,’’ for example, representing different eras of human culture, condenses a periphrastic description of dusk within the appearance of dawn and then transmutes
it into a baroquelike spectacle of light and color, recalling the fine rendering of light in Rembrandt (H .–); Apollo’s location is invoked first by
an appeal to music and then by a series of concrete synecdoches of natural
processes that are to be transformed by the viewer into a rich Titian-like
landscape (.–). The fact that each scene centers on a place instead of
an event is emphasized by the poem’s segmentation: temporal or spatial
phrases (‘‘meanwhile’’ [.], ‘‘Just as the self-same beat of Time’s wide
wings’’ [.–]) connect various scenes by signaling the space and time of
the action. For instance, the narrative movement from the pastoral ‘‘vale’’
in which Saturn is envisaged ‘‘realmless,’’ to the ‘‘other realms’’ where the
fallen Titans are imprisoned in their den, to the dramatic entrance of Hyperion and his plunging into night at the end of book one, serves as an
equivalent to shifts of scenery in the theater.
The poem’s action (i.e., the myth of revolution and fall) is accordingly
perceived by means of the transfer of the viewer’s perspective from one
place to another. Against the background of shifting localities, we notice
adjustments of movements as the figures touch, bend, weep, rise, and walk.
As I indicated earlier, movement relates to the viewer’s physical observation and falls into rational segments through the division of mimetic space.
But here I would like to emphasize that what appears as a frozen tableau requires careful textual ‘‘timing.’’ Because each movement is sharply located
both in space and within the poetic segment, what matters is not mimetic
time (the time it takes the figure to move across space), but the duration
within which we construct the figure’s movement. Of central importance is
the adjustment of movement within a segment, and that segment’s adjustment to preceding and successive segments. Accordingly, as already implied
in my reference to the post-Newtonian paradigm, time is not measured by
represented action, but rather serves as the measure of space and movement.
This interplay between objective space (classical, mythological, and
visual ‘plasticity’) and a subjective consciousness that interprets and reads
space in time is radicalized in the cultural values inscribed within this larger
organization of mimetic space. Like Keats’s Grecian Urn, which discloses
the depth of human mortality hidden behind its aesthetic surface, the Titanic den with its abysses, peaks, and gaping holes localizes the Dionysiac
subterranean world that lurks beneath the Apollonian monumentality of
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the ancient Greek world.27 We note that in the depiction of Saturn’s bower
cited earlier (.–), in Hyperion’s palace (.–), or in the temple of
art in The Fall of Hyperion (FH –), horizontal and subterranean spaces
threaten the ‘‘splendour and symmetry’’ of the vertical space.28 Moreover,
in contrast to the superhuman perspective of Saturn (H .–) and Hyperion (.–), Keats’s division of space into its separte elements directs
the reader’s human perspective, which is limited to the here and now and
is realized in the movement from one point in space to another.
The consciousness of the narrator provides a foreground against a shifting background of visionary locations. As we, intruders upon this halfmythical, half-aesthetic world, move from Saturn’s silent bower through
the Titans’ infernal den and toward Apollo’s enchanted shore—all of which
coexist in the mimetic space—we perform a movement analogous to the
process of fall and rebirth and reexperience the frozen states as stages in
the continuous process of the poetic metamorphosis. Accordingly, what we
described in reference to the plot as a disintegration of the mimetic illusion (of time) is compensated for by what appears here as a discovery and
representation of mimetic space along the sequence. In spite of its fragmentation, therefore, and with a crucial difference from the kind of integration
we expect to find in the (post)modernist long poem, the movement of the
narrative is ensured not so much by the linkage of one segment to the next,
but rather by the embedding and perspectivizing of space-images into the
segments. To the extent that the order of the world unfolding ‘‘imitates’’
the order in which its spatialized images impinge upon our consciousness,
time-space is subordinated to the movement of perspective.
Analogical Space: Temporalization and Difference
So far I have pointed to the poem’s action as a process of bodily and perceptual movement across contiguous spaces. The movement of consciousness
. This tension between art’s aspiration toward the ideal and the temporal burden imposed
on it by life is a commonplace of Romantic poetics and a cliché of Keats criticism. My interest lies primarily in the tension’s compositional manifestation. Stillinger’s (: esp. –)
thematic approach, Rajan’s () theoretical perspective together with her focus on figure
and genre, and Vendler’s () emphasis on language, structure, and genesis in the odes all
exemplify divergent perspectives on this tension.
. Lefebvre (: , –) associates Euclidean space with the homogeneous and isotropic
space of classical mathematics. Serres () draws a distinction between the displacements
and fractures in the modern experience of space and the monolithic aspect of Euclidean
space. This is one way of articulating the duality I describe here. Bloom (: ) notes the
condensation of different temporal layers into one image, thereby pointing to the discontinuity in Keats’s spatial projection of time. Bell (: ), with whom I thoroughly disagree,
interprets Keats’s spatial metaphors as vehicles for resolution and synthesis.
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in and across mimetic space provides one way of apprehending time: of
representing it as it is disclosed by the exteriority of space, particularly as
it is perceived and interpreted within this exteriority. But it is analogical
space that most systematically challenges the conventional representation
of time and of classical composition.29 Through it Keats breaks the illusion
of the ‘‘real’’ in the overall as well as the local structure and thereby enables
us to experience time not in its manifestation as a succession of physical
movements, but rather as a perceptual patterning of items that coexist as
parallels within the discourse.
The analogical structure is by no means peculiar to Keats, not even in the
context of other Romantic narratives such as Milton, The Prelude, Christabel,
or Don Juan. What distinguishes its use in Hyperion is not only the dense pattern of similarity and contrast on numerous levels (language, plot, theme),
but also the range of this pattern. For the poem repeats the largest along
with the smallest units, so that its structure can be seen as a series of variations on the same thematic event: the fall and/or deification of a god-figure.
Moreover Keats’s violation of the conventions of action, discussed earlier,
and his consequent shifts from epistemology to ontology lend extra perceptibility to analogical space as a main principle of organization: the poem
telescopes three evolutionary stages into three juxtaposed moments that
interrelate in terms of similarities and contrasts. These relations are foregrounded by the positioning of the gods, by their own questioning of their
situations, by their different vocabularies of knowledge and/or being, as
well as by the distinctive forms which manifest their states and modes of
existence. The sculptural depiction of Saturn, sitting stonelike in an immobile vale or in his later theatrical staging, seeking reason in ‘‘his own sad
breast’’; the picturesque representation of Hyperion ‘‘standing fierce’’ and
‘‘blazing on his orbed fire,’’ seeking knowledge and power in the kingdom of
‘‘soft clime’’; and the hymnlike invocation of Apollo’s search for the divine
knowledge that is inspired by Mnemosyne’s harp—these representations all
participate in the larger parallelism within which the three god figures are
compared and contrasted.30 Given Keats’s weakening of linear action, the
reader is invited to replace the chronological/causal links with this analogical pattern, which anticipates what is known as modernist spatial form, but
is quite unlike the figurative spatialization that Joseph Frank (, )
had in mind.31
. There is nothing new in analogy as such: compare Sternberg’s analysis of biblical and
Homeric analogy (: –, : –). The novelty consists in its perceptibility, relative dominance, and especially in its particular functions, as I demonstrate in what follows.
. For a detailed analysis, see Lachman  (–).
. Sternberg’s (, ) distinctions between narratives that are traditionally structured
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Thus, the logic of Keats’s composition might, on the face of it, seem to
suspend the flow of time, and so to justify the critical objections cited earlier.
But were this the case, it would mean exposing his art to the danger of stasis and working against the spatio-temporal logic governing his universe.
In Keats this logic applies to the world as well as to the composition. According to the law of his world, any object in space (such as the sun, the
moon, a statue, a portrait, or a ‘‘living hand’’) is continually growing and
changing under the pressures of time. Whether in ‘‘unimaginable’’ Pan of
the early Endymion, or in Psyche’s temple, or in the ‘‘unravished bride of
quietness,’’ the logic of metamorphosis is a determining factor throughout
(Gradman ). In contrast to the order of the Enlightenment, the objects in Keats’s world are ‘‘creatures of impulse,’’ which continually exhibit
new identities. But unlike classical (Hesiod’s or Ovid’s) metamorphosis,
where the shifts in age, in generation, or in identity originate in genealogy
and sequence, Keats’s narrative shifts the emphasis from the origin to the
reader’s reconstruction of the sequence. This is done primarily by narrativizing space, analogic as well as mimetic. In both cases, the foregrounding
of space, which is commonly viewed as subordinate to the forward moving
action, joins forces with the narrative to shape distinctive effects of time.
Therefore, in complete antithesis to both critics and defenders of his
‘‘stunted narratives,’’ ‘‘gallery of delights,’’ and ‘‘still’’ objects, Keats’s compositional choices throw further light not only on his art of time and space,
but also on the theoretical issue at point. In those very poems where he both
thematizes and questions the concept of action, he stops short of his original
plan to depict the history of art as a general progress of beauty.32 This serves
to emphasize the shift of his interest from traditional action to its representation, and from the general idea of progression to the particularity of his
effort to integrate coexisting entities (of the human and the divine, of past
and present, of nature and art, of poetry and life, of visual and verbal art)
by means of a spatio-temporal poetics. In this regard several functions and
effects of Keats’s sequencing of ‘‘the narrative of simultaneity’’ (Sternberg
b: ) deserve special notice:
. On the macro-level Hyperion uses successiveness to suggest spatial correspondence: the poem’s temporal ordering foregrounds a clash between
different modes of knowledge, of being, and of representation.The juxtaposition of Saturn, Hyperion, and Apollo along the narrative sequence brings
on temporal continuity, overlaid by mimetic coherence, and those that are predominantly
spatial in their structuring are more accurate.
. Butler () and Bewell () emphasize Keats’s departure from this initial plan.
O’Neill (: ) interprets the poem’s fragmentation as an articulation of an ‘‘inability to
believe full-bloodedly in a liberal, optimistic version of history.’’
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together divergent attitudes to the relations of beauty and truth (poetry versus life or history). Note, for instance, how Keats’s polar characterization
of Saturn and Hyperion is foregrounded by their diametric spatial positioning: the one seated in an immobile and frozen bower, the other riding
on his orbed fire; the one located below the forests that are visualized as
‘‘clouds,’’ the other located up in space, within the ‘‘clouds.’’ Furthermore,
Hyperion is portrayed in bright and warm colors (‘‘aurorian clouds’’), while
Saturn is depicted within the spectrum of white-gray clouds (‘‘gray-hair’d,’’
‘‘quiet as a stone’’). In addition, verbal parallels that are juxtaposed along
the sequence draw attention to the situational and thematic contrasts that
emerge from the analogy: the words ‘‘still’’ and ‘‘rest’’ simultaneously denote Saturn’s stasis and Hyperion’s movement. Another such parallel can
be seen in the use of ‘‘shady,’’ which as an adjective denotes ‘‘shadowy’’ or
‘‘ghostly’’ and refers to Saturn sunk in his frozen vale (‘‘the shady sadness of
a vale’’), and which then surfaces again as ‘‘shade’’—a noun that connotes
the materiality of the light falling on Hyperion as he dives into empty space
(‘‘touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks’’). Such verbal differences (and I
have picked two among many) sharpen the contrast between the chiaroscuro that hovers on the surface of Saturn’s stonelike relief and the darkening bronzed color that hovers ominously over Hyperion’s realm of excessive light. The accurate positioning, together with the variations in position
and in gesture, invites us to extend the grounds for either contrasts or similarities and to explore further the contrasting modes of representation and
different forms of cognition and subjectivity that are thereby represented.
. Accordingly, the poem’s sequence is employed not only to dynamize
the action on the level of ontology and representation, but also to activate
parallelism on the level of rhetoric.
.. Verbal nuances, such as those cited above, acquire their significance
as they participate in and even propel the transition from one mode of existence to another. Along with the shifts in the gods’ states of knowledge and
corresponding discourses, Keats draws attention to the transitions in their
modes of existence and to the corresponding modes of representation that
they evoke. Saturn, with his ‘‘realmless eyes,’’ is first depicted in the form
of a frieze and later of a ‘‘moving statue’’; Hyperion’s self-reflective view
of ‘‘the misery his brilliance had betray’d / To the most hateful seeming of
itself ’’ (H .–) re-presents the sculptural figure in a picturesque form
(.–); and Apollo, with ‘‘half-shut suffused eyes,’’ evoked in iconic gold
and Delos’s ‘‘olive green’’ (., , ), is linked with the sea-change that
reveals the inner vision beneath both the marble and the heated matter,
which had marked the god’s previous manifestations.
.. Rhetorically, our responses to the poetic alternatives and/or stages
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that Keats presents are affected by the order in which we encounter the
godheads and by the activation of the analogy in the process of reading the
poem. As we progress through the text to book three, for example, the contrasts between Saturn and Hyperion, outlined above, appear diminished
relative to the opposition established between the two Titans (Saturn and
Hyperion) at one pole of historical culture and the Olympian Apollo at the
other (the former belong to past order, the latter to that of the future; the
former define themselves epistemologically, the latter abandons the failed
quest for knowledge, replacing it with a new mode of intuitive and corporeal existence). The analogy between Saturn and Hyperion, which we have
perceived as contrastive until now, is modified and reorganized in terms of
equivalence because of the new materials that enter the pattern. Accordingly, the pattern’s spatial components reverse their value due to the text’s
linear unfolding: as opposed to Saturn and Hyperion, who are paired in
their search for ‘‘power’’ and in their attempt to understand their ‘‘doom,’’
Apollo wishes to actualize the raison d’être of his being: ‘‘Tell me why thus I
rove, about these groves.’’ He searches for an answer in melody, rather than
in reason or power: ‘‘Oh, tell me, lonely, Goddess, by thy harp’’ (.).
From yet another perspective, the straight or contrastive analogy is modified in light of a retrospective reading, which requires an integration, on the
reader’s part, of the diverse perspectives and aesthetic norms that are disclosed along the text’s continuum. In retrospect, the dissimilarities we noted
before mark an evolutionary cultural progression from one mode of artistic representation to another. Keats grounds the development of his composition in the cultural association of Apollo with the higher development
of civilization. Hence, the values bestowed on Apollo are an ameliorated
version of the opposition of Saturn and Hyperion.
. The parallelism joins forces with the absence of a determinate beginning and end, giving Hyperion the shape of a myth-text, which is circular
rather than linear. This results in two different readings: the first invites the
reader (along the lines suggested above) to interpret the three godheads as
representing alternative images of the poet and/or distinct stages in poetic
or cultural history (and so to construct a story that can fill in the missing
causal and chronological links). The second narrative, where the emphasis falls on identity rather than difference, invites the reader to repattern
what has previously been perceived as figures along the sequence or as evolution divided into discrete states. Through repetition the three separate
figures/states now lose their limiting contours and signal parallel existential moments that disunify identity and can be read as divisions of the same
poet figure.
In this context the visual stimulus communicates its spell both locally and
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as a general narrative effect, which governs and reorders all these variations and even foreshadows the outcome of events that loom in the narrative future: the god remains human, whether embodied in ‘‘marble’’ or in
‘‘glowing gold,’’ whether in ‘‘flush’’ or ‘‘olive green,’’ whether numb, full of
wrath, or sorrowful; and therefore in whatever form he might reappear, on
the verge of birth, even ‘‘in midst of shriek’’ and ‘‘celestial,’’ his deification
cannot be fulfilled.33
. As with the macro-, so with micro-organization: Keats’s art refutes the
hypothesis of the ‘‘still object.’’ In addition to temporalizing space by translating it into words, parallelism energizes the object in yet another way. Instead of conforming to mimetic representation through metonymic signs,
Keats denaturalizes mimesis: although predominantly metonymic, his descriptive segments invite the reader to metaphorically substitute them for
one another, making the very patterning of space ambiguous. Here is one
typical example:
His palace bright,
Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks
Glar’d a blood-red throughout all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries,
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flushed angerly; while sometimes eagle’s wings,
Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darken’d the place . . .
(H .–)
The ‘‘palace bright’’ is not a determined, concrete palace that can be specifically located. The series of visual impressions is rather split into various spatio-temporal frames: a literal palace upon which the light glows (in
dawn? at sunset?); a literal sunrise and/or sunset, which is metamorphosed
by the viewer into a fantastic mythological palace; a metonymic or metaphoric palace whose architectonics stand for a layered cultural past; a metonymic portrait of ‘‘blazing Hyperion,’’ sitting insecurely on his ‘‘orbed fire’’
(outside the palace or inside one of his ‘‘thousand courts’’; [.–]); a
fantastic image that condenses dawn, twilight, and approaching night, thus
. It is interesting how such evoking of the poem’s narrativity bears on our sense of its
(in)conclusive ending. I disagree, therefore, with critics who read the poem’s interrupted ending as a gesture of defeat: whether stylistic and formal (James ); thematic/existential;
philosophical (Muir ); biographical (Sperry : ); aesthetic (Hartman ); narrative ( James ; Bewell ; Scott : –; Bennett : –); or narrative and
ideological (O’Neill ). Dickstein () and Rajan () are among the few critics who
do not see the poem as either an existential or a formal failure.
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metaphorically anticipating the coexistence of birth and death in the god’s
metamorphosis; and a picture plane in which all the above coexist.
It is not a literal landscape that is perceived here, but the way in which—
like the image of the god himself—space appears in time, when the materiality of a ‘‘bronzed obelisk’’ imperceptibly dissolves in the light, when the
drop of red glares its path through the ‘‘thousand courts’’ up to the ‘‘arches
and domes’’; when the life of the god is disclosed in the movement, color,
and temper of the clouds. And even if all these frames collapse into one object (i.e., the picture plane itself ), this architectural construct is dissolved in
the immaterial movement that frames it in a thousand ways. The montage
of so many space-constructs within a brief segment means that different
views can be fitted together in multiple ways; the reader is compelled, as
in modern art, to jump from one frame into another. As in cubism the part
stands for the whole, or for another part.34 Thus in the above passage, a
single ‘‘shade’’ can evoke a gradation of color, light, or emotion, depending on the context, on the semantic frame within which we actualize it. In
this way ‘‘glowing gold’’ can signify a spectrum of brilliance, reverberating
in a ‘‘thousand courts’’ and ‘‘fiery galleries’’; ‘‘arches’’ and ‘‘domes’’ imply a
larger architectural scene; the ‘‘curtains of Aurorian clouds’’ stand for the
color and texture of the visual splendor and so, by metonymic extension,
for the entire Aurorian spectacle, for the cultural monument through which
they are seen, as well as for the ‘‘picture plane’’ in which all the above are
situated.
Accordingly, against neo-classical privileging of transparency over opacity, as recommended by Lessing, Keats foregrounds the distorting power of
the medium and renders it perceptible. His construction of space is complicated by the fact that in the dominant metonymic relationships there remain
gaps that elude such continguous associations. Keats compels the reader to
jump from one reality frame to another and to intersubstitute those frames.
This explains how the indeterminate patterns dance more freely than in
any distribution of space details in a classical description.
These points of interaction between space and time foreground the active
role of the reader in the construction of the fictional world(s) and in its
narrativization. Keats’s technique of embedding one space within another
charges the action with a new sense of time: mimetic action is compressed
to a prolonged lyrical moment in which the poet’s consciousness perceives
. I draw on Harshav’s (Hrushovski) () model of metaphor. According to Harshav,
metaphorical expressions belong simultaneously to two frames of reference, one in which it
has its literal meaning and the other in which it functions metaphorically. Harshav links the
structure of modernist metaphor with cubist composition. See also Dubnick () on verbal
cubism.
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historical events simultaneously. This sense of time transcends the limitations of the traditional lyric: the predominance of analogical space allows
Keats to extend this internalized time by incorporating history into the personal vision of the poetic ‘‘I.’’ The analogic portrayal of the three gods in
Hyperion promotes his search for an aesthetics that can be reconciled with
the famous Romantic ‘‘contrarieties,’’ such as the real/ideal, finite/infinite,
life/art. Each god can be taken as Keats’s commentary on a possible relation
to those fundamental opposites, a relation located at some point along the
historical development of human culture. Saturn is given a mythological,
prehuman consciousness, whose inner strife emerges from a belated historical perspective, while Hyperion’s consciousness epitomizes the very idea of
Romantic tension. Set against these images of wholeness and inner polarity,
the figure of Apollo corresponds to Keats’s search for an alternative middle
ground that would enable the coexistence of the divine and the human, the
ideal and the real, beauty and truth. Hence, if Hyperion embodies the idea
of tension, Apollo signifies harmony. The problematics of reconciling these
opposites lurk in the event of deification itself, which, we recall, is never
fully realized on the level of plot. By extending these divisions along the
sequence, Keats make them determine the virtual conjunctions which do
not coincide with the state of things or the positions of characters which
produce them.
From a more theoretical perspective, Keats’s Hyperion poems extend the
range of the long poem by moving between past and present, the epic and
the lyric, the represented and the communicative situation, thereby estranging the basic categories by which we make sense of the world. The poem’s
spatial organization radicalizes the tension between the mimetic illusion it
purports to generate and its explosion in the reading process. In this sense
Hyperion’s larger units amplify its local Hellenic images, but at the same
time they generate a poetic cultural memory whose goal is to store and animate those images. Keats’s art aims to re-present the classical object in all
its plenitude, while at the same time disassembling it, inviting us to reconstruct it as a mediated fiction in relation to a modern world comprising
multiple points of view. Since the boundaries between these perspectives
are crossed by fragments of reality or language that ‘‘migrate’’ from one
frame to another, the reader is often confronted with the difficulty of piecing
together the fragmented components of each frame.
Beyond the Romantic Paradigm
From the present perspective, the ‘‘breaking up of the grand narratives’’
(Lyotard : ) becomes almost a ruling imperative, and the erasure of
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boundaries between the traditional genres and media contaminates all artworks by the ‘‘ ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch’’ ( Jameson ,
cited in Perloff : ). The question I therefore need to clarify regards
the motive and purpose for the paradigmatic study attempted here. I would
like to venture a few concluding points:
One, this perspective itself, especially if understood (as it is by Lyotard)
to refer back to the larger modernity of Enlightenment discourse, sheds a
new light on Keats as a Janus-faced poet who dismantles the progressivist
models of the nineteenth century as much as the struggle to construct them.
As I hope my analysis demonstrates, Keats’s innovative (de)composition of
classical form works to extend the possibilities of the long poem and sharpens our tools for its investigation.
Two, this study attempts to shed further light on the relationship between
our making sense of the world (as time-space construct) and the development of narrative modes in the long poem. In light of the (spatio-temporal)
outline of Hyperion presented at the beginning of my argument, I would
like to propose a rough outline of the possible transformation of this relationship in the (post)modernist long poem. In a text such as Stevens’s
‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ (written in ; in Stevens ), the image of
time no longer relies on a chronological evolutionary thread where present,
past, and future are related in a continuum. The continuous unfolding of
represented spaces, which is motivated in Hyperion by the bodily movement of human statues and/or by the perceptual observation of the narrator, is replaced in Stevens by the speaker’s associative leaps across disjunctive spaces. The shift from the representation of action across continuous
space(s) in the early text to its construction as an oscillation of the mind
across multiple fragmented spaces in the later reverses the relationship between time and space. Time no longer derives predictably from bodily
movement; rather, unpredictable mental movement across space(s) derives
from a new organization of the text.With both action and bodily movement
omitted from the segment, the poetic progressions proceed through verbal
jumps, rather than from discrete spatial divisions. According to the scientific definition, the division of space into segments is no longer ‘‘rational’’ or
logically bounded. Parts of the image and the textual segment (line, phrase,
and stanza) are relatively autonomous. While interacting with each other,
they resist being reconciled into an organic whole. Consequently there is
no totalization of space in an organic image of the whole. Due to the shift
from representation to construction, the role of the temporal medium itself
is radicalized. This sharpens the break with the conventional model (epic
and/or Newtonian) that, as argued, can already be found in the Romantic
paradigm.
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Three, from a point of view of poetics and history, the recurrent interplay
between time and space (as dimensions of world and of discourse) reveals
a family resemblance between the two models. For example, Keats’s Hyperion and Stevens’s ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ offer two manifestations of
the poetics of the long poem. Both poems develop predominantly along
the dimension of space, and both consequently commit themselves to the
conflict between the spatial object and the verbal medium, so as to ‘‘make
strange’’ the world and the medium. Each manages the interplay between
mimetic and analogical space differently: the former foregrounds mimetic
space; the latter, analogical space. Yet the two models are not antipodes,
but two different branches of the (post)Romantic paradigm. The changing
hierarchy between the axes of world and composition interacts with distinct
shapes of temporality; this interaction and its effects deserve further study
and may well change the clear-cut picture sketched above.
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Published by Duke University Press