Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Apollo as Keats?
If Apollo is the ideal poet, or a hero for Keats, it is not unlikely that
Keats would strive to identify himself with Apollo, and that he may eventually
have felt himself in some measure to have attained that identification.
Few critics if any would argue that the Apollo of Keats' earlier poems
is Keats himself, but some do claim that by or through writing Hyperion,
Keats came to be confident enough to attempt such an identification. Douglas
Bush, for instance, makes the admittedly unsubstantiated pronouncement
in Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (1937) that Apollo in Hyperion
"is John Keats" (120). The not totally unjustifiable tendency is to assume,
as Blackstone does in The Consecrated Urn (1959), that "the necessity of
self-identification with the chief actor" is inherent in poetry, or at
least in Keats' poetry (228). Blackstone believes that it is because of
this attempt to identify with Apollo that Keats abandoned Hyperion. In
earlier poems, Keats felt unready to attempt this, and when he tries in
the Hyperion he fails to "fully identify himself with the hero": "He would
like to be Apollo...but he wasn't, and he could not pretend to be" (The
Consecrated Urn 229, 240). In Imagination and Myth in John Keats' Poetry
(1993), Diane Brotemarkle argues along similar lines, but claims that the
impossibility of completing Hyperion lay in the incomplete nature of his
aesthetic theory. He did not know what Apollo, or the new generation of
poets among whom Keats figured prominently, ought to be; he was only certain
of what the were replacing in Titans such as Wordsworth. Any attempt to
identify Apollo with Keats must determine carefully, then, when such an
identification might be intended and when it might not, and must be aware
of the tensions within such an identification, the places where for one
reason or another the analogy flounders and Keats finds Apollo alien to
himself.
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created 5/7/98