SOURCE: Taylor, Anya. “Superhuman Silence: Language in Hyperion.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 19, no. 4 (autumn 1979): 673-87.

In the following essay, Taylor looks at depictions of divine speech in Hyperion. The critic also focuses on the use of silence and figurative language in Keats's reworking of mythology within the Romantic period.

Ever since Keats set down his Hyperion to take up the burden of his brother's death, readers have joined him in finding the epic too abstract, in finding it a detour in Keats's artistic development, or in finding it too discontinuous in style, with the antique, chiselled frigidity of books one and two falling into the regressive bathos of book three.¹ When the poet himself leads the way in dismissing his poem, it may seem quixotic to try to argue for its successful coherence. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that Hyperion consciously and consistently works through a...