It is the purpose of Keith White's John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence (1996) to trace the various deployments of the Apollonian metaphor and analyze what they might tell us about Keats' artistic and philosophical development. According to White, Keats' early fascination with light and fire imagery as representative of the essence of natural beauty meant that Apollo found a welcome home in the mythopoetic mind of Keats. With some chronological overlapping, White sketches Apollo's, and therefore Keats', development through three major stages from what will loosely be termed as the sensual to the ideal through to the skeptical.
Apollo at first represents the perfection of the physical, sensual beauty
found in Nature. The god of the pastoral is a god who attempts to
traverse the gap between the physical and the ideal by mimesis
but is eventually supplanted by an ideal Apollo who seeks to escape human
pain and the destructive effects of time by transcending rather than imitating
nature in art. At this stage, nature is only the debased and
fallen form of the ideal. However, one by one, the ideals associated
with Apollo are undermined and revealed to be "gilded cheats" or the phantom
impossibilities of a self-deceiving dreamer. The true poet must embrace
the earthly realms along with mortal ills and artistically transform
rather than transcend them in the manner of the Platonic Apollo.
If he is Apollo at all, he is a mortal Apollo.
In White's construction of the Apollonian complex, Apollo achieves a
kind of stability by continuing throughout Keats' poetic career to represent
the greatest possible excellence of each stage, but previous visions of
Apollo are left behind like shed skin. Thus in Keats' Hyperion the
old, sensual Apollo becomes the Titan sun-god, Hyperion, about to be deposed
by the young, ideal Apollo, and in Lamia Apollo becomes the doomed Lycius,
the young self-deceiving dreamer.