A striking example of Cole's romantic fantasies, this painting echoes the artist's other works of the period in its Italianate scenery and its attempt to illustrate themes dealing with the grandeur of antiquity, the passage of time, and the reassertion of nature. Rejected by Cole's patron, Luman Reed, and subsequently owned by the artist John M. Falconer, The Titan's Goblet defies full explanation. The massive goblet, trimmed with vegetation, around whose rim are found classical ruins, and on whose glassy surface boats sail, has been linked to both Norse legend and Greek mythology. Theophilus Stringfellow, Jr., described it as a self-contained, microcosmic human world in the midst of vast nature; Falconer linked the monumental stem of the goblet to the trunk of the Norse world-tree, likening it to "the ramifying branches … which spread out and hold between them an ocean dotted with sails, surrounded by dense forests and plains." Other theories tie the fantastic forms to J. M. W. Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (National Gallery, London), to Italian architecture and geological formations, or to the golden goblet of the sun god Helios. The loftiness of the cup, rimmed with classical remnants, suggests the temporary gulf between the present, embodied in the surrounding landscape, from the classical culture that continues to nourish with its cascading waters.

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