New Mythology: The Redefinition of British Hellenism in Selected Poetry of Percy B. Shelley and John Keats

This bachelor thesis sets to examine Romantic Hellenism in selected works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. During the Romantic era, Ancient Greece occupied a unique position, on the one hand it was admired and promoted as an ideal, on the other hand it was reduced to a very limited selection of texts even at university level. While the Romantic movement originally strived to liberate itself from the classical authorities and sought their own, new ways of poetic expression, the second generation of English Romantic poets made interesting attempts to appropriate the legacy of Ancient Greece, only this time (allegedly) independent of the established canonical views. In my thesis I examine the question of (both actual and perceived) authenticity, the influence of other interpretations, and the problem of authority in the selected works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, two second-generation Romantic poets whose education pertaining to the classical world was substantially different. My goal is not to judge the appropriateness of the varying allusions to Ancient Greece in their work, but rather to examine the different relations of the authors to the different, insurmountably other and idolised world. The first chapter is concerned with the authors' different approaches to the original..