Chapman's Version of The Odyssey and the Iliad

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Chapman's Version of The Odyssey and the Iliad This poem is an expression of how the poet John Keats felt after rediscovering Homer's "The Odyssey and the Iliad" when he read Chapman's English translation of this Greek classic. To express this he uses the form of a sonnet, with fourteen lines, every set of two lines rhyming. The first four lines are one long sentence consisting mainly as metaphors to summarize his full meaning in whole. "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen". This can be understood only in a "literary" and not a "literal" sense. I say this because he was relatively poor and probably had traveled very little when he wrote this poem at age 21.* But we know that he had a strong passion for literature. * John Keats is trying to tell us that he has traveled and explored the rich realms of literature. "Round many western islands I have been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold". Keats is using "western Islands" to cause us to think of ever new vistas of constant discovery. Keats is stressin...

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