SOURCE: Faflak, Joel. “Romantic Psychoanalysis: Keats, Identity, and (The Fall of) Hyperion.” In Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, edited by Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, pp. 304-27. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Faflak asserts that the Hyperion poems indicate how Romanticism invents, as opposed to prefigures, psychoanalysis. Faflak concentrates on the poems' construction of abject identity through an analysis that develops from Lacanian and Kristevan theoretical positions.

Whereas in Paradise Lost, God is introduced by Milton to sanction his authority as a writer of epic verse, Book 3 of Keats's Hyperion begins by discarding the apparatus of epic, for by Keats's time the hermeneutics of epic discourse had been unsettled by a poetic language subject to temporality rather than transcendence. In his notes to Paradise Lost, Keats states that Milton “must station” the poem within the religious and historical contexts that shape...