Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul D. Sheats

Critical Essay by Paul D. Sheats

SOURCE: Sheats, Paul D. “Stylistic Discipline in The Fall of Hyperion.” Keats-Shelley Journal 17 (1968): 75-88.

In the following essay, Sheats asserts that the style of The Fall of Hyperion utilizes a restrained use of imagery combined with intensity of sensation, which demonstrates Keats's growth and artistic discipline.

The summer of 1819 abundantly fulfilled Keats's prediction, in June, that his “discipline was to come, and plenty of it.”¹ In virtual retirement from the world at Shanklin and Winchester, he apprenticed himself to the new styles and forms of Otho and Lamia in a deliberate attempt to become a “popular writer” (Letters, II, 146). During these months he observed and welcomed the growth in himself of another sort of discipline, a “healthy deliberation” that could bear the buffets of the world calmly and with dignity. As he put it to Reynolds in July, he was “moulting: not for fresh feathers &...
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