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The elation of observing a new planet for the first time would no doubt be very intense, and this speaker's enthusiasm, he thinks, is equal to that of the astronomer. He also refers to the enthusiasm of the western explorers who originally discovered the Pacific Ocean. Those explorers had at first believed that they had reached the Asian continent, in particular, India.
The sonnet genre is often, although not always, about ideals or hypothetical situations. It reaches back to the Medieval Romances, where a woman is loved and idealised by a worshipping admirer. For example, Sir Philip Sydney in the Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence wrote in this mode. Poems were circulated within groups of educated intellectuals and they did not necessarily reflect the poet’s true emotions, but were a form of intellectual showing-off! This may not have been true of all; it is a matter of academic debate today. It is generally believed, however, that Shakespeare’s sonnets were autobiographical.
An Unfortunate Error: Balboa not "Cortez"
Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more. Whereas Pope and Dryden were classical scholars as well as writers, Chapman was a working playwright. Chapman’s translations are less elegant and smooth than Pope’s, but what they lose in sophistication they arguably make up for in vigor. These two analogies are linked subtly through Keats’s use of the word ‘swims’ (‘a new planet swims into his ken’), with this watery word leading into the description of Cortez staring at the Pacific. Certain critics have posited the notion that the employment of the name "Cortez" suits the rhythm of the line better than the accurate name. They are thus willing to forsake the accuracy of history for the aesthetics of art—an unfortunate and even dangerous stance, which damages the reputation of both art and history.
But he couldn't read The Odyssey or The Iliad in the original Greek, because he didn't know Greek. So he's had to rely on translations, like Pope's, that didn't really impress him that much - and he didn't really get what was so great about Homer. One of the most popular versions at the time was by the poet Alexander Pope. Keats really didn't like Pope's translation - he thought it seemed artificial, and it was stiff and flowery. He didn't really like it because Keats was a Romantic poet, and he wanted something that didn't have artificially ornate language, because that's kind of anti-Romantic.
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer Analysis
Additional materials, such as the best quotations, synonyms and word definitions to make your writing easier are also offered here. This is also a very visual experience, and Keats emphasises Cortez’s eyes by calling them “eagle eyes”. This suggests that Cortez’s eyes are keen, observing strongly and are paying close attention to detail, just as Keats thoroughly observed all of Chapman’s Homer, so much so that he felt as though he was breathing it in and literally surviving though it.
In his imagination, he has also been to the world of the romances delineating the tales of myth related to the people of the romantically enchanting islands on the western coast of England and Scotland such as Hebrides and others. John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet.
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Keats praises Chapman’s unconventional and bold approach to Homer. The sonnet, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ is written by Keats when he was still a student at school. George Chapman (1554 – 1634) was an English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan age, who translated Homer’s works in 1596. Keats read Chapman’s translation of Homer for the first time on a night in 1815 when he and his friend, Cowden Clarke spent the whole night reading it.
The Romantics were all about naturalness and language that you can understand and all that crunchy, hippie stuff. Keats's metaphor would be less effective if he did not invoke two actual discoveries in the poem - one astronomical, the other terrestrial. It's well-known that the sighting of the Pacific Ocean, alluded to in the last four lines, should not have been attributed to Cortez but to another conquistador, Balboa. (Yes, Keats should have done more research – but he was in a forgivable hurry.) Less widely known is the fact that the "watcher of the skies" summoned in lines nine and 10 is the astronomer, William Hercshel, who had discovered a new planet, Uranus, in 1781. Chapman was the first poet to try to render Homeric rhythms in English. John Keats, first published in The Examiner in 1816 and later published in Poems , Keats’s first collection.
Keats' friend, Clarke, actually pointed that out to him and told him, 'dude, you might want to change that.' But Keats left it as Cortez - maybe because Balboa has three syllables, while Cortez has two. Your English teacher won't take that as an excuse, but Keats can get away with it. If your English teacher says, 'Why did you say this,' and you say, 'Oh, it sounded good, it didn't make any sense though.' that's basically what Keats is doing. So that's why it's Cortez instead of Balboa, and why it's wrong.
• Italian, where eight lines consisting of two quatrains make up the first section of the sonnet, called an octave. It is followed by the next section of six lines called a sestet, that forms the ‘answer’ or a counter-view. This style of sonnet is also sometimes called a Petrarchan sonnet.
The speaker then chooses two other bits of information that help him show the drama and depth of awe he has felt with this new, improved translation. He compares that feeling to the feeling of an astronomer as the scientist watches while "a new planet swims" into view. Henry James refers to Keats's sonnet in Book 2 of The Golden Bowl , in his description of Adam Verver's discovery of his passion for collecting objects of art. Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by Keats's writing about the discovery of Uranus when he wrote his early poem "Al Aaraaf" . As is typical of sonnets in English, the metre is iambic pentameter though not all of the lines scan perfectly .
It signifies that he is quite aware of the literature of Apollo. This is IvyPanda's free database of academic paper samples. It contains thousands of paper examples on a wide variety of topics, all donated by helpful students. You can use them for inspiration, an insight into a particular topic, a handy source of reference, or even just as a template of a certain type of paper.
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