Poems

from 'Poems', 1817 This is easily one of the two most beautifully evocative poems I've ever read, the other one being Coleridge's 'Kublai Khan' . It's no coincidence that both poems were written within a few years of each other, by poets who would come to symbolize their time: the Romantic Revolution of the early 18th century occasioned a paradigm shift in the theory of poetic expression, and the Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, …

…later, when I discovered the wonderful free-verse translation by Robert Fitzgerald, that I first came to breathe the pure serene of Homer's original. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken...on first looking into Fitzgerald's Homer. One detail worth pointing out in Keats's sonnet is "deep-browed Homer"--a Homeresque epithet in itself, like "grey-eyed Athena" or "ox-eyed Hera" or "rosy-fingered dawn" or "the wine-dark sea."