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KEATS THE MYTHMAKER.
Abstract
John Keats's only opportunity to see genuine works of ancient Greek sculpture was when he looked upon the Elgin Marbles. He was so caught up by their "immortal youth," the timelessness of beauty and truth, that he found in them a "religion of joy." His enthusiasm was not merely a romantic nostalgia for the Golden Age but an instinctive reaction to a living heritage--unobservable reality in observable form. The enduring masterpieces of another age held the mythical appeal of the past merging into an eternal present. Contact with the plastic arts helped to mold his thought and direct him on a quest for what he most desired--immortality. We see the results of a struggle to attain his goal in the poems which contain his own natural religion or a system of beliefs in the evolutionary progress of the soul. In "I stood tip-toe," "Sleep and Poetry," Endymion, and the two Hyperion poems, Keats developed a mythic pattern which reveals the birth, growth, and destiny not only of a poet but of man himself. His interest in the revival of myth was partially due to the time in which he lived, the early part of the nineteenth century when long established folkways were beginning to feel theheavy weight of change brought about by the effects of both the French and the Industrial Revolutions. But the questions he mythologizes are of a universal nature: how can he achieve identity in a chaotic world? what are his responsibilities to his fellowman? why must there be pain and suffering? and what is the formal and final cause of existence?
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
HALGARD, MARYNOLA NOVOTNY, "KEATS THE MYTHMAKER." (1975). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI7613329.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI7613329