The Significance of Lamia

In an article Poetry of Sensation or of Thought? I attempted to show how Endymion and Hyperion: A Fragment are related to the æsthetic problem that Keats first analyzed in Sleep and Poetry. At that time I suggested that the Odes and Lamia, following as they do the abandoning of Hyperion: A Fragment, are the outpourings of a mind released at last from the self-imposed duty of writing a poetry of humanitarian philosophy and allowed to indulge its creative genius for the poetry of sensation. It was my contention (and still is) that Keats had been trying to force himself, like his own Apollo, to accept “Knowledge enormous” as Beauty—knowledge “of the agony and strife of human hearts”; whereas at least one half of his being was affirming passionately that Feeling, particularly that which passes through the refinery of the creative imagination, is Beauty. It was his acceptance of this side of his nature that produced most of the poems written in the spring of 1819. But during the summer of 1819 Keats plunged once more into the old conflict. It will be the purpose of this paper to show how Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion are related to it.