Endymion and the "labyrinthian path to eminence in art"

This book offers a comprehensive account of John Keats’s attempt to achieve artistic eminence through his first great long-poem, Endymion. The author traces the influence of Virgil on Keats’s early poetics and explores the role of the Aeneid as a model for Endymion. The labyrinth features prominently in the Aeneid, and it also plays a particularly important role in the early stage of Keats’s poetic career. Thus, it can be used to help explain the complex structure and style of Endymion. The book also shows how Keats employed the labyrinth symbol to style himself a poeta vates in the tradition of the Augustan-Roman poets. Keats’s use of the Augustan-Roman tradition is to be seen in the context of the struggle for poetic (and cultural) authority between Conservative and Liberal forces. By assuming the traditional authority of the divinely inspired poet, Keats legitimised his proclamation of an alternative view of society and poetry in Endymion. A supporter of the Liberal cause, Keats rejected warfare in general and literary war-scenes in particular. The author of the book argues that Endymion is Keats’s failed attempt to write an innovative “Peaceful epic” in the tradition of the Romantic personal epic – a worthy medium for conveying the vatic vision of peace and human understaning. While Keats incorporated the elements of an epic poem on a formal level, Endymion nevertheless turned into an epic romance. Dissatisfied with the result, Keats relied on a less ornamental and more Grecian style in Hyperion.