Hyperion (poem)

Hyperion, a Fragment is an abandoned epic poem by 19th-century English Romantic poet John Keats. It was published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). It is based on the Titanomachia, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians. Keats wrote the poem from late 1818 until the spring of 1819. The poem stops abruptly in the middle of the third book, with close to 900 lines having been completed. He gave it up as having "too many Miltonic inversions." He was also nursing his younger brother Tom, who died on 1 December 1818 of tuberculosis. Keats picked up the ideas again in his unfinished poem The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1856), published after his death. He attempted to recast the epic by framing it with a personal quest to find truth and understanding. These poems were Keats' final attempt to reconcile his perceived conflict between mortal decay and absolute value.