![]() Hunt, the first to publish a Keats poem, (“O Solitude” in 1816), went on to publish an essay introducing both Keats and Shelly as young poets to watch, as well as the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816). ![]() Keats’s first collection, Poems, was also published in 1816, and while it did not garner much critical acclaim, it introduced his work to luminaries of the English Romantic movement such as Samuel Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who recognized Keats’s latent genius. By 1815 Keats had resolved to become a poet, though he stayed in medical school until 1817. He wrote his first extant poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, when he was 19, inspired by contemporary second-wave Romantic poets Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. While his youth was marked by outbursts of extreme emotion and volatility, he soon matured into a promising young surgeon. John Keats was born in 1795 to a hostler (stableman) in Moorgate, London. ![]() Written while Keats was still in school, years before he wrote his series of Great Odes in 1819, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is an early example of Keats’s ecstatic attention, in which his poetic vision examines an external object with Romantic breadth, coupling its physical reality with a rarified nature that Keats could singularly perceive. The poem is the most famous of Keats’s early works and illustrates the transformative power of poetry on the young poet, and, in a broader sense, the ability for art to inspire epiphany in those who encounter it. ![]()
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