Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Apollo: God and Hero
With different degrees of emphasis, a number of critics recognize in Keats'
fascination with Apollo a version of youthful hero-worship; Apollo serves
Keats as a locus of both inspiration and aspiration. As the ideal poet
Apollo was someone with whom Keats could feel himself "analogically identifiable"
(Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn 227). In the parallel texts of Hyperion
and The Fall of Hyperion that identification is made as the mortal poet
takes Apollo's place before the goddess Memory. However, as a hero, Apollo
is not the perfection attained but the perfection aspired to. Apollo can
be seen, argues Ian Jack in John Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967), as
"in a sense the hero of all [Keats'] poetry and of his entire poetic career"
(176). Keith D. White likewise finds it natural that "someone who is young
and enthusiastic about a career" should discover "someone who represents
the best or the highest achievement in that career and...begin, in a sense,
to adore him or her" (38). White, however, believes that Keats' later poems
reveal a changing attitude towards Apollo. As the patron god of poetry,
Apollo is the source of poetic inspiration, not only as material for a
poem but as the bestower of the poetic gift and vision. "To Keats," argues
Jack, "Apollo was more than a figure of speech or a literary allusion:
he was becoming something very close to the God of his adoration" (John
Keats and the Mirror of Art 180). How close Apollo comes to this depends
on how seriously we should take poems like God of the golden bow in which
Keats suggests that he is under the protection and influence of Apollo
and could be held accountable for blaspheming Apollo by donning a laurel
crown before he had proved himself worthy: When--who, who did dare To tie
for a moment thy plant around his brow, And grin and look proudly, And
blaspheme so loudly, And live for that honor to stoop to thee now, O Delphic
Apollo? (l. 30-6) The difficulty in laying so much emphasis as Jack does
on Keats' worshipful attitude towards Apollo within his poetry is the marked
lack of references to Apollo in the letters of Keats and his friends (White
38). Apollo appears to remain more an object of textual worship than actual
worship for Keats, however much psychic and creative energy he devoted
to the god.
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created 5/7/98