SOURCE: Bode, Christoph. “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats's Poetics.” Wordsworth Circle, 31, no. 1 (winter 2000): 31-37.

In the following essay, Bode analyzes Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion as part of a consistent, rather than a continuous, expression of Keats's poetics. Bode sees the poems as marking the development of Keats's thoughts on “negative capability.”

According to many critics, John Keats gave up Hyperion and later recast it as The Fall of Hyperion, first, because he had experienced some fundamental change in his outlook on life, on the course of human history and the place of suffering in the world; and, secondly, because he had come to see that his poetics of “negative capability” was incompatible with his new understanding of the poet as healer and a poetics of empathy which he expounded in his “vale of Soul-making” letter, spring, 1819. In this view, The Fall of Hyperion would...