Keats’s Poems: Summaries and Critical Commentaries

Abstract

The speaker recounts his varied reading experiences, all of them valuable but none so bracing as his first encounter with the Greek poet Homer, whose works he had often heard mentioned but never delved into until his discovery of an English translation of them by the Elizabethan poet George Chapman. The perusal of Homer has been a revelation, eclipsing all of the speaker’s previous reading and exhilarating him with the Greek’s clarity and breadth of vision. He sees himself, on this momentous occasion, in terms of an astronomer who locates a new, unlooked-for star in the firmament, or as a brazen conquistador standing dumbfounded on the threshold of a new, unsuspected ocean.