Keats’s Unwritten Epic

When Keats told friends he had ‘given up’ his epic project, ‘Hyperion’, in September 1819, he expressed dissatisfaction with its artful ‘Miltonic inversions’. While sailing to Italy in the autumn of 1820 and in the months before he died, however, Keats told Joseph Severn about an epic he wanted to write—on Sabrina, the river goddess in Milton’s Comus. This essay offers the first critical investigation of Keats’s projected poem. I pursue Keats’s unwritten epic, using Severn’s accounts, a selection of Keats’s letters and poems, and the source text to reveal what may have interested him about Milton’s rendering of Sabrina’s story and what it can tell us. Far from putting Milton behind him, Keats continued to draw inspiration from his poetry, returning to a work he had previously dismissed and finding fresh pleasure in a masque that Milton had composed in his mid-twenties, long before Paradise Lost. I suggest that in Sabrina, the tutelary spirit of the Severn, Keats found a figure of transformation, survival, and healing—a young goddess whose liminal existence on the Welsh border and whose partially told story appealed to his imagination and his belief in poetry’s enduring power to transcend mortal limits.