Item from Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Martin Silenus's epic poem that summons the Shrike with each completed canto — and Raul Endymion's narrative that completes it — the work of art that IS the narrative you're reading.
The Hyperion Cantos is Martin Silenus's lifework — an epic poem modeled on Keats's unfinished 'Hyperion' and 'The Fall of Hyperion.' Each completed canto summons the Shrike and causes a death. The poem is simultaneously a literary masterpiece and a cosmic trigger — art as weapon, beauty as destruction. Raul Endymion completed the Cantos from a Schrodinger box prison cell, writing the narrative of the Endymion novels as the poem's concluding sections. The Cantos is therefore self-referential: the four novels ARE the Cantos, written by characters within them. This metafictional structure is the Cantos' most literary quality — a story about the power of stories, written as the story it describes.
A text — both the epic poem Silenus spent centuries writing and the narrative Endymion completed in his prison cell. The Cantos is self-referential: the book you're reading IS the Cantos, completed by the characters within it.
Also known as: The Cantos, Hyperion Cantos, The Poem