The Science of Man

This chapter focuses on Hyperion. In The History of America, William Robertson describes the effect on the colonies of a sophisticated but exploitative European government. Hyperion certainly has an imperialist flavour and Keats would have had a useful introduction to the history of empire from Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, Robertson's History of America and Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The idea of Apollo as an ambivalent, ‘modern’ Columbus figure and the Titans as either ‘infants’ or ‘ancients’ is reinforced in the poem by references to Apollo as ‘loveliness new born’ and by the representation of his enabling state as one of continual rebirth as compared to the Titans' frozen forms. The Hyperion project is not only revealing of that philosophically ‘forked creature’ that Chandler calls ‘enlightened romanticism’, but also reflects and illuminates the complexities of Enlightenment histories themselves.

Ancient history · Apollo · Art · Art history · Empire · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Philosophy