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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Meiko O'Halloran
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Scholarship on Keats’s fascination with Milton has tended to focus on his response to Paradise Lost. This article sheds new light on Keats’s engagement with Milton by exploring the significance of his reading of Samson Agonistes with Charles Brown during their walking tour of North England and Scotland in the summer of 1818. I suggest that Milton’s rendering of human suffering in Samson Agonistes answered Keats’s previous doubts about Milton’s ability to ‘think into the human heart’, enabling him to revise his ideas about epic and further conceptualise the work of the poet as an act of healing. In Samson Agonistes Keats found a model of poetry that puts pain, patient suffering, and limited vision at its core. These ideas became central to Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, the epic fragments which bookend Keats’s ‘living year’ between the autumns of 1818 and 1819.
Author(s): O'Halloran M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Romanticism
Year: 2022
Volume: 28
Issue: 2
Pages: 128-140
Print publication date: 01/07/2022
Online publication date: 28/04/2022
Acceptance date: 15/09/2021
ISSN (print): 1354-991x
ISSN (electronic): 1750-0192
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2022.0549
DOI: 10.3366/rom.2022.0549
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