John Keats's response to Chaucerian dream poems in The fall of Hyperion:a dream

Abstract

In this thesis I investigate whether and how John Keats responds to Chaucerian dream poems in his fragmentary work The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. I begin by examining Chaucer’s reception in the Romantic period, exploring how Chaucer was both admired and criticized, and the special challenges to reading and understanding Chaucer’s work that Keats and other Romantic period readers faced. Throughout this first section, I place special emphasis on the reception of the Chaucerian dream poems. In the second chapter I summarize some of the most common positive and negative critical views of The Fall by discussing those critics who consider the fragment to be an artistic failure, and those who read it as the philosophical maturation and progression of the dreamer-poet. I then proceed to give my own reading of the poem, which relies heavily upon both the conventions found in Chaucerian dream poems and Keats’s own poetic theory of the ‘chameloen poet’. In the third and final section, I compare and contrast a number of passages from Keats and Chaucer to demonstrate that Keats was indeed influenced by Chaucerian dream poems, particularly in the induction and Moneta’s physical description and function, but also in the overall structure of the poem. I conclude the third section by suggesting that some of the difficulties that critics have had with the poem, such as the apparent non-integration of its several narrative frames, may be solved by recognizing that The Fall is indeed written in the tradition of Chaucerian dream poems.