Keats and the Sleeping Giants

Keats’s 1818 summer trip was inspired and mapped by poetry and formed a crucial stage of his own creative journey. During the tour, the literary giants in his mind—Shakespeare, Burns, Ossian, Dante, Wordsworth—came face to face with those embedded in the rocks and mountains, catalysing Keats’s creative energy as they clashed, and helping to forge a language adequate to his epic ambition. In Scotland he found places that seemed to offer access to older ways of thinking and imagining. His response to natural phenomena as huge, sleeping beings was an intuitive version of an ancient animism, a shared language for expressing extraordinary natural power. The effects of physical exhaustion, a loss of bearings and preoccupation with sleep, are illuminated by the insights of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which gives a new dimension to Keats’s idea of ‘negative capability’. The essay argues that memories of the Scottish tour, intensified by the profound feelings surrounding the final illness of Tom Keats, fuse in the creation of Hyperion, Keats’s monumental ‘fragment’.