Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Mythology and Classical Knowledge in the Romantic Era
It is helpful, in doing a myth-critical study of Romantic period poetry,
to know something of the ideas concerning the ancient world available to
the poets, without which, it is difficult to analyze how the poets receive
or rework mythology. Douglas Bush (Mythology and the Romantic Tradition
in English Poetry) is unfortunately the only myth-critic to survey the
state of popular Classical knowledge around the Romantic period. He often
name-drops more than he explains, but he does point us in several important
directions for contextualizing the Romantic poets. In addition to the traditional
study of Classical literature, the middle of the eighteenth century onward
saw a "great advance in the study of every branch of classical and oriental
archaeology and topography" (41). Lord Byron made Sir William Gell's The
Topography of Troy (1804) and The Geography and Antiquities of Ithica (1807)
familiar books on the subject (41), and Keats relied on an earlier source,
John Potter's Archaeologia Graeca (1697-8), in Lamia (40-1). The new attention
paid to classical Greek sculpture resulted in a "battle" over the Elgin
Marbles (Pagan Myth 35) and was perhaps influenced by Winkelman's praise
of the serenity and simplicity of Greek art (Mythology and the Romantic
Tradition 48). The myth of Greece itself, the story of an ancient past
from whose fertile imagination sprung archaeology, art and architecture
as well as mythology, was as compelling as the mythology. Homer, as part
of this Greek myth, became a prime example of the "inspired child of nature"
and original genius to be found in "folklore, ballads, and 'primitive'
epics" (44). Not only were various "primitive" arts and oral poetries being
compared, but "primitive" religions and mythologies were also being syncretized
within the Romantic period. Blackwell described mythology as the literally
believed "Allegorical Religion" (Mythology and the Romantic Tradition 45),
the "first religion and philosophy of man," while scholars "sought in myth
the key to a primordial unity in the religious experience and imagination
of the human race" (Pagan Myth 36). The myth of Hellenism and Hellenic
mythology were both familiar echoes of original human creativity and, as
Harding argues, defamiliarized traces of a half-silent, half-speaking past
(The Reception of Myth 15). Ancient myth was both a victim of rationalist
inquiry and an unknown exciting the imagination.
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created 5/7/98