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Jeffrey Peters THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Dying Into Life: Keats's Apollonian Salvation A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Jeffrey Peters 2018 Dying Into Life: Keats's Apollonian Salvation Jeffrey Peters, PhD Director: Virgil Nemoianu, PhD Modern critical discussions of John Keats have largely ignored the theological aspects of his works, and only Robert Ryan has provided a full length analysis of Keats’s theological beliefs. However, Ryan provides little analysis of Keats’s Apollonian poems. The most influential recent critics, including Nicholas Roe, Jeffrey Cox, and Ronald Sharp, have focused on either the political or aesthetic aspects of Keats’s Apollo while only a few critics have discussed Apollo in theological terms. No study has traced the development of the Apollonian system within Keats’s poetry to provide a theological interpretation of the Apollonian poems. Methodology This dissertation will investigate Keats’s theological beliefs according to the terminology employed by Ryan and will explore the development of Apollo within Keats’s poetry according to the structure established by Walter Evert. The first chapter begins with a survey of scholarship on Keats’s use of Apollo and Greco-Roman mythology throughout his poetry. It will also explore Keats’s reputation as the most “Grecian” of the Romantic poets. The second chapter will analyze Keats’s early use of mythology within his poetry written between 1815 and 1816. It will explore Keats’s exposure to Christianized Greco-Roman myth and Virgil as a schoolboy. Then it will discuss how the juvenile poems, “Ode to Apollo” and “I Stood Tip-Toe,” reveal Keats's understanding of Apollo and poetry. The third chapter will analyze Keats’s chronologically development from an amateur poet in 1816 into a career poet following the publication of Endymion in 1817. It will first investigate the use of Apollo in “Sleep and Poetry” as it relates to the two juvenile poems then discuss the penitent narrator of “Hymn to Apollo.” The chapter will conclude by examining how aspects of Keats’s earlier poems are integrated into Endymion. The fourth chapter will analyze Keats’s first attempt to compose a long narrative poem about Apollo. It will then probe the role of Apollo within Keats’s Hyperion in the context of statements within Keats’s letters and the Apollo imagery of his early works. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of Keats’s odes as a possibly continuation of the themes of Hyperion.. The fifth chapter will investigate Fall of Hyperion as a summary of the themes and concepts developed within Keats’s earlier Apollo based poems. The chapter will begin with an exploration of Lamia and then explore how the imagery of Keats’s previous Apollonian poems are appropriated into Fall of Hyperion. Then, the chapter will explore the relationship between the Fall of Hyperion and Virgil’s Aeneid Book 6. The chapter will conclude by exploring Biblical echoes within the poem and how they are merged with Greco-Roman myth. The sixth chapter will consider Fall of Hyperion and Hyperion as one narrative. It will first explore the influence of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Virgil’s Aeneid in the development of Keats’s epic-like poem then discuss his inclusion of a pseudo-apocalyptic vision, the rebirth of a deity, and the abandonment of Eden. Having examined the development of Keats’s Apollo and the sources that influenced it, the sixth chapter will conclude with a focus on defining the type of theological system that Keats created with Apollo. This study challenges the current critical consensus regarding how Keats employs an Apollonian theological system within his poems. The study also complements Ryan’s original analysis of Keats’s theological beliefs by pursing a line of argument that Ryan did not pursue. Finally, this study provides grounds for a revised assessment of Keats’s Hyperion poems. This dissertation by Jeffrey Peters fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English Language and Literature approved by Virgil Nemoianu, PhD, as Director, and by Tobias Gregory, PhD and Joseph Sendry, PhD as Readers. _________________________________________________ Virgil Nemoianu, PhD, Director _________________________________________________ Tobias Gregory, PhD, Reader _________________________________________________ Joseph Sendry, PhD, Reader ii Chapter 1 John Keats was baptized at an Anglican church in Bishopsgate and buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, but most modern critics dismiss the possibility that he was a practitioner of the Anglican faith. Although biographers have provided background into the relationship between Keats's relatives and the Church of England, especially the possible influence Keats's devout but likely "dissenting" grandmother Alice Jennings, detailed accounts of what Keats may have learned and accepted of the Anglican faith are lacking. Much of our modern understanding of Keats was established by Walter Jackson Bate's dominating biography, and it diminished his theological views to "Agnostic." Bate admits that his view comes from "Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition," an early, minor poem: "Yet here we glimpse for the first time–at least in any real graphic way–the youthful, almost absent-minded agnosticism with which he began his adult life. 'Agnosticism' is the most positive word we can justifiably use."1 In Bate's view, Keats's agnosticism, like tuberculosis, was a disease that slowly destroyed Keats, consuming his final moments with pain: "Then, after all this, condensed within so short a time, come the final months when, bewildered, ill, often helplessly delirious, and constantly questioning why everything should be torn from him, the early agnosticism–the product of sheer accident and environment–returns in the cruelest way."2 With such a strong view of Keats's beliefs or lack thereof, Bate then pronounced what would stifle future investigation into any theological meaning behind Keats's poems: "that the poetry itself is so largely untouched by any direct interest in religion, either one way or another. Hence admirers of Keats's work, if they themselves were devout, could conscientiously leave the subject undisturbed. Others felt 1 Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963. p. 133 2 Bate p. 133 1 2 contented that the subject did not obtrude."3 With such conviction behind this pronouncement, it is no wonder that few critics have bothered to challenge Bate's assessment. Re-analysis of Keats's theological views, especially in Robert Ryan's study of Keats's letters, suggests that there are hints of a theological system within his works that cannot be ignored even though he was not an orthodox Christian. What Bate assumes is an attack on Christianity and organized religion, described as "superstition," is instead the beginning of Keats's search for a theology that more adequately reflects a non-dualistic view of morality. The rebellious essence of British Romanticism encompassed all aspects of life, and the Romantic poets envisioned idealistic political systems, purified philosophical and theological ideologies, and a transformation of the soul that would bring them closer to the sublime. As most second generation Romantic poets rejected mainstream political views, so too did they reject the religious orthodoxy and sought out ways to discuss their views of God, the universe, and salvation outside of traditional Anglican models. Mark Canuel explains that many works written during the Romantic period were marked by a desire for "toleration" and witnessed some of the most intense and creative challenges to the authority of the confessional state–the monopoly of the Anglican church, enforced through oaths, tests, and penal laws, over all regions of British civil and political life... But these works also revealed established religion to be a spectacular political failure: an attempt to produce order that resulted in chaos, an attempt to establish legal control over regions of consciousness which continually eluded all legislation.4 As a response to the previous political, theological, and artistic ordering of the universe during the British Enlightenment, the fixation of Neoclassical hymns on Christian salvation was replaced by depictions of the psyche's operation, man's relationship to the universe, or a search 3 Bate p. 133 4 Canuel, Mark. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing 1790-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 2 3 for the sublime within nature. The language of Christian dogma no longer served as an appropriate system to discuss the divine, and new models with pre-Christian origins were relied upon. Although pre-Christian deities or mythic creatures were used throughout Christian literature before the Romantic poets, the Romantic poets no longer treated them as mere poetic conceits or linguistic flourishes. Instead, the ancient gods were imbued with an essence that had either a theological component or represented aspects of the divine within nature. Even some of the early poems of the later turned orthodox William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge are read by critics as containing pantheistic elements that give nature qualities rarely seen within the previous Christian literary corpus. It is with little wonder that the poetry of the heterodox John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are seen as lacking
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