SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “Keats's Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton.” In Romantic Revisions, edited by Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, pp. 321-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Bate discusses the influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Bate focuses on Keats's repeated attempts to compose a more politically progressive, less Miltonic Hyperion.

One of the most powerful chapters in Walter Jackson Bate's magisterial biography of John Keats is the thirteenth, ‘The Burden of the Mystery: The Emergence of a Modern Poet’.¹ It is there that we are presented with an image of the young Keats grappling with the problem of the inherited literary tradition. Out of Wordsworth's pregnant phrase, as quoted by Keats, ‘The Burden of the Mystery’, grew Jackson Bate's conception of ‘The Burden of the Past’. John Keats was published in 1963; the following year Harold Bloom wrote...