The Stasis of Time and the Importance of Incompletion in 'Hyperion: A Fragment' Thea Dunne College

Keats’s Hyperion was not completed, a fact that is in some ways central to its current reception. Either lauded or dismissed by critics, as an artistic endeavour it was a failure. Central to this failure seems to be the Keat’s confusion of stasis and progress. The primeval Titans are celebrated and subordinated to their successor Olympians, while Keats’ Miltonic fragment, coloured with the tone of the epic and visuals of Classical art, remains a ‘fragment’.

The sense of time, timelessness and the passing of time is emphasised a great deal within Hyperion. Most striking is the sense of stasis before the time expressions ‘then’ reintroduce action into the narrative. The protracted suffering of the immortal is painfully emphasised. Saturn had ‘slept there since’ an unspecified time ‘while his bow’d head seem’d listening to the earth’ because of the broad span of geographical history and the creation of the earth allows this comprehension. A sense of an unspecified Time, a conflation of Instant and Eon[1] characterises much of the action within the narrative, for example where Thea addresses the sleeping Saturn: ‘Saturn sleep on, while at thy feet I sleep / So came these words and went; the while in tears / Until at length old...