SOURCE: Ober, Warren U. and W. K. Thomas. “Keats and the Solitary Pan.” Keats-Shelley Journal 29 (1980): 96-119.

In the following essay, Ober and Thomas examine the implications of Keats's use of Pan in The Fall of Hyperion. They asserting that the character operates figuratively as the Romantic Imagination.

One of the most fascinating cruxes in Keats's poetry occurs in lines 410-411 of Canto i of The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, as the utterly defeated Saturn in his dejection sends “Strange musings to the solitary Pan.”¹ These lines near the close of the first canto appear in a passage in which the narrator, Keats's persona, having ascended the steps to the altar in the temple of Saturn, is being accorded a vision of the deposed Titan by the goddess Moneta, priestess at the shrine. There, beside Moneta “Like a stunt bramble by a solemn pine” (line 293), he is privileged...