Reflecting on the virtues of ancient poetry in his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), Hugh Blair claims that ‘an extensive search’ would uncover ‘a certain degree of resemblance among all the most ancient poetic productions’ on the basis that ‘in a similar state of manners, similar objects and passions operating upon the imaginations of men, will stamp their productions with the same general character’. It is, of course, to one of the first ‘states’ or ‘stages’ of society that the poems of Ossian ostensibly belong, and although Blair goes on to argue that the ‘resembling features’ apparent...

By the close of the eighteenth century, the historiographical dispute concerning the ancients and the moderns had in many areas resolved itself in favour of the moderns, and doctrines of continuous or progressive degeneration across the arts and sciences were increasingly rare as the century advanced.¹ William Mavor’s Universal History, Ancient and Modern (1802), which Keats read while still at school, endorses the widely held view that warfare and government had improved with the passage of time and that modern monarchies were preferable to ancient ones (I, 20–3, 47–8, 101–2).² With respect to learning and technology too,...

In Sleep and Poetry Keats asserts the voice of a ‘new school’ of poetry alluded to by Hunt in an 1816 article for the Examiner, in which he introduces three young poets (Shelley, Reynolds and Keats) and refers to a school ‘which promises to extinguish the French one that had prevailed among us since the time of Charles the 2d’ (1 December 1816, p. 716). The article appears after a long tirade on The Times and its support for ‘the right divine of kings to govern wrong’, lending by association an overtly political dimension to the article on the ‘Young...

Several months passed between the composition of Hyperion and its revision as The Fall of Hyperion. Keats began to write Hyperion in February 1818, only to discard it in frustration in April 1819; and it was not until July 1819 that he started to work on The Fall.¹ During the period between the two poems, he revealed in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America that he was ‘reading lately two very different books Robertson’s America and Voltaire’s Siecle De Louis xiv’, an experience that he playfully describes as ‘like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the...

Another of the more pressing socio-political issues debated by Keats and his contemporaries was the question of whether commerce was beneficial to society and the majority of its members. Encompassing the discourses of moral philosophy, political economy and political science, the early nineteenth-century debate over the moral and social implications of economic exchange was essentially a reaction to Enlightenment conceptions of wealth-creation: the traditionally ‘benign’ view of economic endeavour as a civilising activity had been rejected by enlightened thinkers in the mid-eighteenth century in favour of a more systematic and scientific analysis of individual rights, free trade and the satisfaction...

When he abandoned Hyperion in May 1819 Keats cast off a model of history that seemed tentatively able to negotiate between stadial and sympathetic modes of representation. The question remains why he decided two months later to revise the fragment as The Fall Of Hyperion, which he had also ‘given up’ by September 1819 (LJK, II, 167). Some commentators have argued that the answer lies in his growing awareness of history’s resistance to any authoritative frame of reference, even the ‘humanised alternative’ to progressive history.¹ The poem’s dream framework is indeed suggestive of the difficulties he faced in completing a...

The developmental frameworks evident in poems from Sleep and Poetry to The Fall of Hyperion are most often read in relation to theories of influence and maturation. Keats certainly stages his own development as a ‘very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers’ (LJK, I, 214), but both his self-representations and ‘life of allegory’ readings of his work have obscured the extent to which the sociological drive of his poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment. His awareness of the ways in which changes in social and economic conditions are reflected in literary practices, as well as his understanding of the...