“Keats’s vision of the ideal poet is based on a conception of pain.” Write a short essay discussing the given statement with reference to Hyperion.

       According to Keats, an ideal poet “has no self…it has no character” and this identity less character is earned by suffering in thousand diverse ways. In Hyperion, Apollo is the ideal poet as he had suffered the most, more than the dethroned Titans. By suffering intensely the poet god becomes “a sage; /A humanist, Physician to all men” (“The Fall of Hyperion,” I, 189 – 190). In his letter to Richard Woodhouse (in October 27, 1818), Keats explained his concept of ideal poet. According to him, the ideal poet has no identity, “it has everything and nothing – it has no character…What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet…most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity”. To become an identity less ideal poet one must experience other’s suffering and pain. It seems Keats was obsessed with pain and death and he had his reasons. Keats was intimately familiar with pain, loss, feverish suffering and death. He spent six years studying medicine and earned a license (from the society of Apothecaries) to practice in London. He witnessed tuberculosis wiping off his family members one by one. He used poetry to make sense of pain for which there was no reasonable explanation, as Nicholas Roe puts it, “a poet who embodied and gave voice to the anxieties and insecurities of his times.” His letter to George (also known as “vale of soul making” letter) celebrated the feverish pain as an important material that would form the soul...”souls are schooled in a world of pains and troubles.” Human must go through the “vale of soul making” where the human heart must feel and suffer in thousand diverse ways. Soul should be earned by the individual without divine grace or intervention. This evokes Buddhist concepts of reincarnation, in which soul gains enlightenment (Bodhi) and freedom (Nirvana), as it passes through “dukkha” (suffering, the first Noble Truth), “Samudaya” (the origins of suffering), “Nirodha”(cessation of suffering through estrangement) and Marga (right path). 

       In Hyperion, Apollo is the god who suffered the most and his suffering transcended him to divinity. As Helen E Haworth puts it, “as Apollo underwent human suffering to become a god…through endurance of another’s pain, the right “to see as a god sees.” To be a man, a poet, or a god, the individual must earn his salvation through a fall.” 1 In Hyperion, Apollo is the ideal poet and the fallen Saturn is the antithesis of ideal poet, as Saturn’s existence depends on his kingship and power, he must be a king - or nothing. Unlike Titans, Apollo, like other Olympian Gods, is first in beauty and first in might. Refinement of knowledge leads him towards the truth. Apollo is apotheosized by Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. Knowledge enormous makes Apollo a God. Through gazing into Mnemosyne’s eyes, Apollo remarks, 

 “Knowledge enormous makes a God of me,

 Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events,

 rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,

 Creation and destroyings, all at once Pour into the

 wide hollows of my brain, And deify me,” 

       Apollo absorbs the totality of humankind’s experience. As a God, he has to know everything, that’s the necessary condition for the newly deified God, result of the vast evolutionary process, progress and natures law. Apollo must suffer; suffer more than the fallen God. Like Christ, his assumption of the suffering of the world transcended him to Godhood. 

      They both “die into life”. It is Apollo who suffers with a pang as hot as death’s chill, most like the struggles at the gate of death, Apollo shrieks, not the dethroned Titans. Entire essence of Hyperion is that of doom. This epic poem of Keats is about the doomed Titan Gods’ dethronement. The poem itself was doomed too. Keats left it unfinished, abandoned it in the middle of the line. The poet was also doomed. He nursed his brother Tom (exposing himself to infection) throughout the year 1818, and in this very year he started this epic poem Hyperion. His brother died (in 1st December) and he got hold by his “family disease” tuberculosis and later died of it (in 1821). 

       Not only Keats’s vision of ideal poet, but also his vision of a complete human being with a soul is based on the conception of pain. Without suffering and pain, man does not even have a soul, let alone poet or “ideal poet”. Apollo in Hyperion represents his vision of ideal poet as he suffers the most.