John Keats: A Journey into Imagination John Keats (Oct 31, 1795 – Feb 23, 1821 (age 25)) masterfully crafted On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer which was written in 1816 to express his love of literature and the power it held. When he was a young boy (eight years old), he lost his father because he was trampled to death by a horse, and his mother from tuberculosis. As he was now alone, it left him devastated and depressed. It was shortly after his father passed, that he found his comfort in literature. Out of the 54 poems crafted, this was one of the few that were hopeful. The poem is separated into two sections; the first being an octet describing his reading experiences before reading Homer and the second section is a sestet which
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One of the consequences being that Keats has now been exposed to yet another realm (or world) to which Keats compares to the heavens. Keats expresses his excitement at the discovery of Homer from Chapman’s translation. To understand it, imagine looking up at the stars at night and seeing a planet or a new constellation that has yet to be discovered until this day. Another way to imagine this excitement would be climbing a difficult mountain thousands of feet into the air and when you get to the peak, you do not see the land bowing to you as you expected, rather there is an ocean at the peak the stretches into the horizon infinitely. “When a new planet swims into his ken;” depicts the awe of the expanse of what he knew to what he now knows. This is when the saying “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” comes into play because he realized just how little he knew to what the possibilities now are. With the use of the words “swims” from “swims into view”, relates to the image of water that is portrayed throughout. For instance, at the beginning of the poem Keats spoke of the journey that Odysseus took around the islands, the swimming planets, and goes on to Cortez, a Spanish conquistador that discovered the Pacific Ocean “with eagle eyes”, while exploring The New World in
One of the consequences being that Keats has now been exposed to yet another realm (or world) to which Keats compares to the heavens. Keats expresses his excitement at the discovery of Homer from Chapman’s translation. To understand it, imagine looking up at the stars at night and seeing a planet or a new constellation that has yet to be discovered until this day. Another way to imagine this excitement would be climbing a difficult mountain thousands of feet into the air and when you get to the peak, you do not see the land bowing to you as you expected, rather there is an ocean at the peak the stretches into the horizon infinitely. “When a new planet swims into his ken;” depicts the awe of the expanse of what he knew to what he now knows. This is when the saying “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” comes into play because he realized just how little he knew to what the possibilities now are. With the use of the words “swims” from “swims into view”, relates to the image of water that is portrayed throughout. For instance, at the beginning of the poem Keats spoke of the journey that Odysseus took around the islands, the swimming planets, and goes on to Cortez, a Spanish conquistador that discovered the Pacific Ocean “with eagle eyes”, while exploring The New World in