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, …showed first 75 words of 546 total…

…showed last 75 words of 546 total…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."