Endymion: A Poetic Romance

Endymion is written in heroic couplets. These are pairs of lines that rhyme and are generally written in iambic pentameter (10-syllable lines that alternate unstressed and stressed syllables), or a loose pentameter (lines around 10 syllables). Keats revived the heroic couplet form, which was popular in previous centuries. Christopher Marlowe and John Donne used heroic couplets, as did many translations (or modernizations) of Chaucer.

The stanzas of Book 1 of Endymion vary widely in length, from three lines (in Stanza 27) to 146 lines (in Stanza 26). Each book of the entire work contains around 1000 lines, bringing the entire poem to a total of 4000 lines. This narrative work is a romantic epic, one that can be compared to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. While the Faerie Queene primarily focuses on Arthurian legend, it also includes Greek allusions that reflect the myths that Keats alludes to, and retells, in Endymion. Romantic epics are stories of adventure and love, usually told in episodes. Endymion combines the present action, such as the ritual to Pan, with past action recalled in dialogue, such as Endymion’s vision of