Hyperion
by John Keats(1820)
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale far sunken from the healthy breath of morn.”
One great work, every day
by John Keats(1820)
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale far sunken from the healthy breath of morn.”
John Keats(1820)
Keats attempted an epic on the fall of the Titans and the rise of the Olympian gods, and what he completed before abandoning it contains some of the most magnificent blank verse in English. Saturn sits dethroned, bowed and silent; Hyperion, the sun god, is the last Titan standing. Keats was studying Milton's Paradise Lost and trying to surpass it, and in passages he succeeds. He stopped writing it, perhaps because he felt too much under Milton's influence, perhaps because he was dying. The fragment breaks off mid-sentence. What remains is like a ruined temple: the grandeur evident in every surviving stone.