| Description |
The Fall of Hyperion, one of the last poems that Keats wrote, opens by inviting the reader to consider whether the dream that it relates is that of a poet or of a fanatic. As the poem continues, Keats elaborates on this notion of two distinct types of visions, raising questions about how and why they differ, what good each type may achieve, and what place they should occupy in the dreamer's life. Such problems, whether satisfactorily resolved or not, help indicate both Keats's fascination with the motif of dreaming and his refusal to accept any simple application of it. Unlike his romantic contemporaries Coleridge and Shelley, who frequently write about dreaming as a positive, valuable experience, Keats worries about the negative aspects of being caught up in a dream and wonders if even the pleasures that dreaming can give are not largely illusory and dangerous. In some ways much more skeptical than either of his two contempories, Keats, by the end of his poetic career, could not believe in the possibility of finding perfect, eternal joy and transcending mortal pain and tragedy through dreams. While Coleridge's and Shelley's speakers will often visualize unending bliss and contentedly lose themselves in those visions, Keats looks beyond dreams in The Fall, seeing them as either destructive impediments to waking existence or, at best, mere stepping stones to a better understanding of the mundane world into which one must inevitably awaken. |
