ABSTRACT
The authors' survey of the literature of the second half of the eighteenth century has touched on many a tendency anticipatory of the Romantic Movement. John Keats’s short life of rich productiveness, terminated by consumption at the age of twenty-four, added another facet to the figure of Romantic poethood personified. Wordsworth’s solitary spiritual grandeur, Coleridge’s drug-fed exoticism, Byron’s volcanic emotional lawlessness, Shelley’s rapturous idealism, Keats’s poetic priesthood of beauty – these traits coalesce with an immense cult of revolutionary ardour on behalf of the uncorruptedly natural and human, to form the image of the Romantic poet. In the epic fragment, Hyperion, the subject is the dethronement of the old sun god by his successor, young Apollo. In the first of the two versions Keats made, the Miltonic opening represents Saturn lamenting his lost power and considering with the other Titans how he may restore it.
