SOURCE: Goldberg, Brian. “Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in The Fall of Hyperion.” Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 2 (2000): 229-54.

In the following essay, Goldberg examines Keats's use of Indian imagery in both Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion. Goldberg also looks at the prevalence of Indian exoticism in writings of the Romantic period.

According to recent discussions, Keats's Hyperion fragments draw on a historiography of style that opens with the ancient sublimities of Egypt and moves on to the lucent beauties of Greece and Rome. This argument is based largely on descriptions of the Titans which allude to Egyptian sculpture, thus recasting the war with the classical Gods as an “international event” pitting the west against a “prototypical Orient.”¹ The identification of the Titans with Egypt is also grounded in Keats's biography; Egyptian sculptures were displayed in the British Museum next to the Elgin Marbles, where the...