Endymion by J.

Keats
Literature research papers on Endymion illustrate that Keats was one of the greatest of Romantic Poets. By the time Keats long verse poem Endymion: A Poetic Romance was published in 1818, the Romantic program had largely been established and there were a number of artists working in romanticism in literature. Despite the fact that Endymion embodies many of the Romantic preoccupations, it was harshly criticized upon publication, and Keats later abandoned the Miltonic style that he had employed throughout the poem. Literature research papers on Endymion illustrate that Keats was one of the greatest of Romantic Poets. Although his later works were written in a more organic mode, Keats did not abandon the principle thematic concerns of Endymion. Clearly, one of the chief preoccupations of the poem is with romantic and erotic love. Another important theme in the poem is the quest for ideal beauty and love. The romantic and erotic love in Endymionis represented in a way that signals not only the heightened sensuality of Romanticism, but also the linkage between romantic and erotic love and the creative process and the power of the imagination to change the parameters of the experienced world. Endymions quest for love is equated with the creative imagination and its constant search for enlightenment, which is embodied physically in this poem through the recurrent images of sun and moonlight. In this way, Keats merges two of the major preoccupations of Romanticism, namely, the privileging of the sensual as well as the unique mechanism of the creative imagination. Ideal beauty, which was a major theme throughout Keats entire oeuvre, plays a major role in Endymion as well. Two significant interpretations can be made of the role of ideal beauty in the piece, both of which deal with the protracted Garden of Eden system of allegory that is present in the poem. As discussed previously, the longing for a past age or era is a trope that runs throughout Romantic art. This trope is represented in Keats classical choice of subject matter, as well as in the repeated references to an idyllic state that resembles biblical descriptions of a prelapsarian Eden, the quintessential golden era. *** Throughout the four books of Endymion we find Keats still working, more even than in his epistles and meditations of the year before, under the spell of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Spenser and the Spenserians, foremost among them William Browne; Drayton in his pastorals and elegies; Shakespeare, especially in his early poems and comedies; Fletcher and Ben Jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like The Faithful Shepherdess or The Sad Shepherd; Chapman's version of Homer, especially the Odyssey and the Hymns, and Sandys of the Metamorphoses of Ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we feel his mind and ear to be full. In their day the English language had been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages. Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental, Italianate fashion of his own. And now came young Keats, not following closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during the illustrious half century from 1590-1640. He chose the heroic couplet, and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century. He was even more sedulous than any of his Elizabethan or Jacobean masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the intervening age had disallowed. There was a special rashness in his attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages--the marks of what Pope had denounced as 'our rustic vein and splay-foot verse'--was bound to bring against him. First of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. He no longer uses double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with a profusion like that of Britannia's Pastorals. They occur, but in moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four books. At the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with 'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish' (with 'fish'). The long passage quoted from Book III in the last chapter illustrates the narrative verse of Endymion in nearly all its moods and variations. Rime is to some poets a stiff and grudging but to others an officious servant, over-active in offering suggestions to the mind; and no poet is, rightly a master until he has learnt how to sift those suggestions,

rejecting many and accepting only the fittest. Keats in Endymion has not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. He had a great fore-runner in this fault in Chapman, who constantly, especially in the Iliad, wrenches into his text for the rime's sake ideas that have no kind of business there.

One of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, was its re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the Greek mythology. For a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human spirit had been forgotten. There never had been a time when the names of the ancient, especially the Roman, gods and goddesses were used so often in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention; merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons classically educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilisation, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and not they.