earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Keats’s political consciousness was actualized in Hyperion in connection with his poetic theory, Negative Capability. Keats supported the progressive and optimistic development of history and Hyperion clearly mirrors his historical view. Keats sympathizes with fallen titans such as Saturn and Hyperion throughout the work. In the speech of Oceanus he announces that the change of generations is an inevitable rule of nature and an eternal truth. However this work was left unfinished, I think, due to the inner conflict between his political consciousness (focused on the progressive development of history) and deep sympathy for the historical victims of progress. Nevertheless, it is clear that he displays his political awareness in Hyperion. Until very recently, Keats has been regarded as an apolitical romanticist who is remarkably disengaged from social and political issues and the historical anxieties of his own times. Many critics agree that this image of an escapist and aestheticist originated in malicious campaigns by Tory journalists including Z. While Keats’s early poems like “On Peace” and “To Hope” show his radical political awareness explicitly, his later poems—with their propensity for Greek myth, medieval romance, and beauty—do not appear to show any political opinions. However his strong faith in the possibility of progress is expressed metaphorically in his later poetry which is filled with his Negative Capability poetic theory. He discarded his own self in sympathy for other things and wrote poems using this poetic theory. This paper examines Keats’s political awareness as described in Hyperion. It also evaluates the reasons postulated for why the work remained incomplete in relation to his Negative Capability poetic theory.