Heidi Thomson From Cloudy Trophies to Quiet Power: Keats’s Hyperions, the 1819 Odes, and Michael O’Neill’s Late Poetry Abstract: This essay reads Keats’s 1819 poetry alongside Michael O’Neill’s poems about his terminal illness. It focuses on Keats’s abandonment of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion in favour of ‘To Autumn’ through a juxtaposed reading of ‘cloudy trophies’ and ‘quiet power’. The Hyperion poems explore the collapse of the Poetical Character in the face of incurable, immortal suffering. While the spring odes, exemplified in a reading of ‘Ode on Melancholy’, attempt to balance the dynamic between a speaker and its poetic subject through apostrophe, the conclusions of the odes are self-cancelling. ‘To Autumn’ signals a breakthrough from curative to palliative poetics through the simultaneous celebration of life insisting on itself and the process of dying. The contrast between Guy’s Hospital and the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester underlines the shift in vision from incurable suffering to palliative, quiet power. Keywords: John Keats, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘To Autumn’, Michael O’Neill This essay is about the difficult quest for ‘quiet power’ in Keats’s poetry, with particular reference to the Hyperion poems and with excursions to Michael O’Neill’s final poems and his scholarship about Romantic self-conscious poetry. The ‘Keats in 1819: Cloudy Trophies, Quiet Power’ conference theme lined up two concepts which Keats found increasingly hard to reconcile: the Poetical Character’s full identification with one’s poetic subject (ending up, inevitably, among the cloudy trophies) and the necessity of calm detachment for thoughtful composition (quiet power). 1 In late 1816, Keats, then a medical student and Dresser at Guy’s Hospital, had outlined in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ a progress of poetry away from sensual escapist joys towards ‘a nobler life, / Where I may find the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ (123–5). The end of poetry was to ‘be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’ (246–7). 2 It is tempting to read the 1819 poems as the most confident realization of this goal, but it could be argued that the poetry of Keats’s annus mirabilis is just as much a refutation as a vindication of the progress outlined in ‘Sleep and Poetry’. The end may still be to ‘sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’, but the emphasis is on alleviating suffering when there is no remedy, to make the inevitable bearable rather than to cure the illness or resolve the problems. 3 There are limits to fixing ‘the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’, even for poet-physicians, and Romanticism 28.2 (2022): 141–153 DOI: 10.3366/rom.2022.0550 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/rom