Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Apollo: Aesthetics Personified
From the god of poetry to the archetypal
poet is no great step, but Apollo exceeds those bounds. Apollo is more
than poet; he is also the mortal poet's sovereign and inspiration. He furthermore
extends his reign over the realm of astronomy, over medicine, and, by the
sun, over time and season. Walter Evert expounds the theory in Aesthetic
and Myth in Keats (1965) that Apollo's extensive reign is arbitrary neither
in traditional mythography nor in Keats' poetry. Rather, it marks him as
"the god whose special province it is to regulate the universal harmony"
(38) by monitoring the cycles or seasons of the heavens, the earth, the
physical body of man and his intellectual or imaginative powers (31). Although
Keats' reflections on the nature of poetry may be and are at times expressed
without reference to Apollo, Apollo's mythic status as "the generative
god of nature and art" made him "the natural locus for the meeting of the
collocations of experience...Having arrived at this point in the objectification
of his abstract ideas, the poet then could, and often did, adopt the Apollo
figure as the symbolic equivalent of his entire complex of aesthetic values"
(39). Evert outlines the "metaphysical and aesthetic hypothesis" which
Keats expresses in and around Apollo thus: the law of universal harmony,
a spiritual power, runs through all of nature, an ideal which the poet
perceives and translates into art for the sake of those who cannot perceive
or hear the divine voice in nature (30-2). Although each work of art is
a partial and temporal expression of the ideal, the imagination which perceives
the ideal is itself transcendent, outside the bounds of time (31-2, 36).
Apollo is the Ùr-imagination in which "all the powers of song combine"
(Ode to Apollo). (An interesting and very similar theory of Keats' aesthetic
historicism may be found in Diane Brotemarkle's Imagination and Myth in
John Keats (1993).) Because Apollo only represents the metaphysical and
poetic ideal--the harmonic power--expressed in nature and art, he can apparently
be detached from the "conceptual pattern" (40) in which he represents the
ideal. For example, in Hyperion when he must ascend to the ideal and to
godhood, and we may infer from this that Apollo can represent the poet
as well as poesy.
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created 5/7/98