ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Darwin stands behind the unfinished The Fall of Hyperion, describing the poets induction into the deeper mysteries of life and art by the hierophant of a massive Eden-replacing temple. For William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin features as a large but troubling figure: a still-active challenge to their own developing aesthetic. For the younger Romantic generation of Byron, Mary Shelley and John Keats he is less problematic: safe for the young Byron to reject as pass, but also available for Shelley, Keats and the mature Byron to draw on as a fellow-pagan whose lushly pictorial zed classicism is ripe for plunder, especially with Temples richly imaged inductions into non-Christian mental spaces now added to the mix. However, starting at the general level of the younger Romantics handling of the space-time issue, it is arguable that the theme of initiatory spaces which people find in Cain and Queen Mab takes on a centrality with Keats.
