keats and new criticism

Not my best paper either.

Keats and New Criticism

Keats uses both the structure and the content of his poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” to create the poem’s particular aesthetic experience. The poem’s title mentions a translation of Homer, which both contrasts with and complements the poem’s stiff Petrarchan form. The most well-educated people who read Keat’s poetry would have also expected to a working knowledge of Greek to fully appreciate Homer; yet Keats still presents his admiration in a strict poetic form.
The poem’s first mention of action is that of traveling, especially among islands and in the sea. This both alludes to the adventures of Odysseus and provides a contrast for the next poetic image. While the speaker had traveled “in the realms of gold” and been “round many western islands” before reading Chapman’s translation, afterwards he feels like “some new watcher in the skies,” or as if he has discovered the Pacific (1, 3, 9). He refers to this newly discovered land as a place that “Homer [rules]” but had before been unknown to him, providing a metaphor for the experience of wonder and marvel at literature. Even then, it is not Homer, but Chapman, that speaks “out loud and bold” to Keats, emphasizing the importance of the translation in his artistic experience (8). By referencing “feality” to Apollo, Keats also establishes himself and Chapman in the same poetic tradition as Homer, although they are not as high-ranking (4).
Keat’s inclusion of the imagery of realms, islands, seas, mountains and expanses as reveals much about his opinions of literature. According to this metaphor, it is something that can be traveled and discovered as a landscape. Through his poetic devices such as allusion and imagery, Keats paints a literary universe.