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Drayton's Endimion and Phœbe and Keats's Endymion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Claude L. Finney
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Extract

The Endymion myth, which grew up in the popular traditions of Elis in the Peloponnesus and of the Ionian cities in Caria, received literary treatment in a lyric poem of Sappho which is now lost. It does not exist in full development in extant classical literatures, although allusions to it are found in Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Lucian, Ovid, and Cicero. After the Renaissance when the study of classical literature was revived, it became a favorite subject for poetical allusion in the literatures of modern Europe. But the only poet before Keats who treated the myth at length was Michael Drayton; and, therefore, if Keats owed any suggestions for the plot of Endymion to his predecessors, he would most likely have derived them from Drayton.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1924 , pp. 805 - 813
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1924

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References

Notes

1 Keats was doubtless familiar with the allusions to the Endymion myth in the poetry of Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, and William Browne.

2 John Lyly's play, Endimion, which is an allegory of the politics of the court of Queen Elizabeth, has no structural feature similar to Keats's Endymion.

3 Payne Collier: Literal Reprint of Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe. I have used this reprint as the text of my quotations.

4 Sir Sidney Colvin: John Keats, etc., New York, 1917, p. 168.

5 Op. cit. p. 216.

6 Sir Sidney Colvin thinks that Keats derived the suggestion for Endymion's wanderings from The Man in the Moone; but in the case of Endymion's flight through the air Keats's account is totally unlike the account in The Man in the Moone, in which Drayton discusses astrology instead of describing the stars imaginatively as he had previously done in Endimion and Phœbe. But see Sir Sidney's discussion, op. cit., pp. 168ff.

7 Op. cit. p. 170.