was infinitely
greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two
fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling
also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his
poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though
far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same
as 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that
he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most
strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had
drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he
needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could
employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the
past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the
point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.
These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when he
began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding
his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.
Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are
incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by
the intellect, but by the being.

He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He
was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him
and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.

'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions
in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather
artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.
English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick
out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty
proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of
feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)

That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.
'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal.
But there is other and more definite authority for the positive
direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at
the same time:--

'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him
would be