WILLIAM COKER Keats, Hegel, and Belated Mythography T HE ROMANTIC PERIOD played host to a broad array of projects for recast- ing literature as a form of thought and revising its relationship to such rival discourses as myth, philosophy, and science. Particularly in the texts surrounding German Idealism, projects boldly proposing the artistic creation of a “new mythol- ogy” coexisted with the resignation of Hegel’s aperçu that art is “of the past” ( Werke 1: 32; Aesthetics 11). Faced with Rousseau’s complaint that the reflexivity of modern life entails the loss of the immediacy he identifies with “nature,” Kant announced as “das letzte Ziel der sittlichen Bestimmung der Menschengattung” (the final goal of the ethical vocation of the human race) that “vollkommene Kunst wieder Natur wird” (completed art should once again become nature) (95). 1 Following Kant’s cue, the theorists of German Idealism dreamt of restoring this lost nature within the work of culture. The fragmentary 1797 System-Programm des deutschen Idealismus — whose anonymous authors may have included the young Hölderlin and Hegel — thus envisioned the sensuous being reconciled with the rational in the form of a “neue Mythologie” (Hölderlin 2: 577). At first glance, John Keats and the authors of the System-Programm seem at least temperamentally mismatched. Keats, who once famously wished for “a Life of Sen- sations, rather than of Thoughts” (Bate 238), 2 sometimes spoke as if he could do without reflection. Yet the ensuing image of Keats as a fashioner of beautiful objects for readerly consumption (see Levinson 34) should not obscure the subtly dialectical approach his late poetry takes toward its own status as an aesthetic object. Indeed, the interweaving of metaphor in Hyperion opens a perspective from which the creation of myth and its exposure as cultural fetish take place simultaneously before the reader’s eye. By examining the relationship between the System-Programm’s search for new mythical forms and Keats’s self-consciously belated myth-writing, I hope to con- tribute to a growing body of criticism devoted to the paradox of Keats’s peculiarly political aestheticism. Some critics, such as Richard Cronin and William Keach, seek Keats’s implicit politics in the nuances of “Cockney poetry,” which Cronin 1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 2 On this wish Paul de Man famously remarks, “he had sense enough to speak of sensation as some- thing one desires but cannot have” (238). In Idealist terms: to a thinking subject sensation only ever appears mediated by thought. See also Corcoran 327. Comparative Literature 67:1 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2862011 © 2015 by University of Oregon Comparative Literature Published by Duke University Press