Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Apollo and the Alien Past?
While there is much that links the poet Keats to Apollo, the god of poetry,
there is also much resistance to any thorough identification between Keats
and Apollo. One reason for this is that Apollo as the ideal poet too far
transcends Keats to be his twin, and so can only be his hero or god. Another
significant barrier dividing Keats from Apollo is that of time, or history.
Apollo is a mythic figure from
an ancient past; it is na¥ve to presume that the god and his world
are readily accessible and unproblematically present for the poet. Keats
was certainly aware of the problematic nature of using ancient mythology
in a modern work. He frets over it in his revised Preface to Endymion--"I
hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece,
and dulled its brightness"--and strives to touch the myth of Hyperion and
Apollo, as he writes Haydon, in a "naked and grecian Manner" (quoted from
Evert 226). Was Keats too late for Apollo? Martin Aske would sound forth
an adamant "yes," so long as we are speaking of an authentically mythological
Apollo in character and aesthetic presentation. Aske's Keats and Hellenism
probes the inaccessibility of Apollo's native home, mythic Greece: "the
ideal space of Greece can never be inhabited in [the] easy intimate way
[that Shakespeare's writings can] because it is a supreme fiction which
can only be materialized, as it were, fragmentarily, or prismatically...it
is, finally, unrepresentable, unimaginable" (4). Reading Hyperion from
the idea that Keats means by touching the "beautiful mythology of Greece"
and by writing in a "naked and grecian Manner" to make the ancient present,
Aske sees the poem as a "necessary failure" (6). Apollo cannot forestall
its failure because he either deviates from the poem's monumental aesthetic,
and thus fails to be Greek (96), or he is himself exposed by the exposition
of "the idea of an adequate restoration of ancient modes" to which he is
native "as an illusion, an impossible nostalgia" (6). Keats' Apollo treads
the line between being the mythological god, or being something entirely
new. Brotemarkle also suggests a historicization of Greek art and myth
which distances Keats from Apollo in Imagination and Myth in John Keats
(1993). In explicit opposition to Aske, however, Brotemarkle tells us that
Keats and his contemporaries did attempt to traverse the "impassable gulf
[which] seemed to exist" between the modern and the ancient; they did look
for ways to redeem "the meaning of the past," to make the past mean for
us (41). Keats' deliberate myth-making or reshaping of the mythic Apollo
as the son of the Titans rather than of Zeus (39), among other alterations,
is one way transcending the barriers of time and making the beauty of the
past the beauty of the present. He touches Greek mythology, and he changes
it.
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created 5/7/98