SOURCE: Ross, Marlon B. “Beyond the Fragmented Word: Keats at the Limits of Patrilineal Language.” In Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, edited by Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, pp. 110-31. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Ross examines the presence of patriarchal language in Endymion and Hyperion. Ross asserts Keats recognized his continued imitation of patrilineal discourse in Hyperion and, in an attempt to subvert this tendency, shifted to an obtuse private language.

In her study The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986) Marjorie Levinson asserts the intentionality of fragmentation in the poetry of the romantics. Asking why Keats's Hyperion “break[s] off before its appointed end,” she appeals to what I call an evolutionary parable, a story of progression that asserts the capacity to gain, if not increasingly greater control over experience itself, at least greater control over a language that orders...