ABSTRACT
Writing to Jane and Marianne Reynolds in September 1817 to relate progress on his new work, Endymion, Keats imagines the poem's eponymous and errant hero intervening to apprise them directly of his state of affairs: ‘he [Keats] has been hawling me through the Earth and Sea with unrelenting Perseverance’. 1 Endymion's account is an accurate one, and although journeying, questing and errancy are regular fare in poetic romance, Keats's Endymion is especially characterised by its dynamic mobility. 2 The poem swings into dramatic perspectives and sweeps out in exuberant gestures, sliding from sky to sea and back, Endymion's ‘track’ Out-shooting sometimes, like a meteor-star, Through a vast antre; then the metal woof, Like Vulcan's rainbow, with some monstrous roof Curves hugely: now, far in the deep abyss (2. 229–32)
