SOURCE: Miller, Bruce E. “On the Incompleteness of Keats's Hyperion.” College Language Association Journal 8, no. 3 (March 1965): 234-39.

In the following essay, Miller asserts that Keats left Hyperion incomplete because he could not resolve the philosophical dilemma created through his profession that the world will inherently improve over time and his uncertainty regarding universal fate and individual will.

Scholars have asked why Keats did not finish a poem which begins as prosperously as Hyperion. As for explanations, Thorpe has indicated the possibility that Keats' love affair may have interfered with work on a heroic poem;¹ Colvin has suggested that Keats' sympathetic portrayal of the goodness and beauty of the Titans was so fine that he found he could not go on to express adequately the surpassing excellence of the Olympians, as the plan of the poem to be inferred from Oceanus' speech would require;² Shackford thinks that Keats ran...