"The Dantescan voice" in Shelley's The triumph of life and Keats's The fall of Hyperion

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of Dante's Divina Commedia on Keats's The Fall of Hyperion and Shelley's The Triumph of Life and the attempt of both these Romantic poets to appropriate the "Dantescan voice." With Keats this was significant because in his earlier Hyperion he was contending with the overpowering spirit of Milton which, as he acknowledged, compelled him to reproduce a feeble adaptation of the Miltonic grand style. Dante's allegorical Purgatorio and especially Dante's encounter with Beatrice served Keats as a model for the "priestess" Moneta who compels him to confront the validity of his poetic art. But it was Shelley, as T.S. Eliot recognized, who was close to appropriating the ''true Dantescan voice" in his enigmatic and ironic Dantean vision in The Triumph of Life. Here, too, the poet feels obliged to express his profound disillusion with the Enlightenment and with the possibility of political reform.