Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Apollo the Poet
"Apollo," we are told by Blackstone in The Consecrated Urn (1959), "is
originally the poet" (106). He is not any poet, but the Platonic "type
of every true poet" who traverses both the divine and the human: "in the
same chariot that he drives up to heaven he also descends from heaven to
liberate the energies imprisoned in gross matter" (106). The two Hyperion
poems best demonstrate Keats' determination "determined to link Apollo
and his vision of human sorrow, to bring the extremes--divine glory and
mortal pain--together in an all-embracing and all-healing synthesis' to
settle once for all (to his own satisfaction) the question that haunts
him: What is the Poet?" (229). By allegorically reshaping the mythic figure
of Apollo as the essential poet, Keats attempts a working out or an articulation
of his ideas about the poet and his making--the experiences and duties
which compose him and his transformation of earthly pain into transcendent
beauty. On a side note, Hermione De Almeida's Romantic Medicine and John
Keats presents a compelling argument for identifying the poet's abilities
and responsibilities with those of the physician, a calling which Keats
was apprenticed to and which also falls under the sway of Apollo. The Romantic
poet and the Romantic physician alike needed insight from the visible into
the invisible, and had to understand pain and disease in order to bring
the humanitarian healing which is his duty. Apollo is thus doubly the type
or archetype which Keats strives at becoming. In this way, Keats becomes
for some critics identified problematically with Apollo.
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created 5/7/98