Capsule review: Mostly forgettable poetry. I enjoyed "Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison", "On first looking into Chapman's Homer", and "Sleep and Poetry".

The poems in this book weren't to my taste. Keats often uses and abuses metaphor to little purpose. Those poems in praise of women (or men) were pretty uniformly uninteresting, with the exception of "Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison", which I rather liked.

The high points of this book were "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" and "Sleep and Poetry".

The former beautifully describes how one feels when reading something new that causes a change in outlook--as though the whole world that one knew shifts over to make room for an unknown and unexplored land. Or, as Keats puts it, one feels "like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." The planet had always existed, hitherto unknown. Beautiful!

As to the latter, I cannot point to just one feature, just one segment, that makes me like it. I like the sound of it far better than the other poems in this collection, and its subject is more interesting than most. Perhaps a selection from the poem will illustrate:

Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse,
And thought it Pegasus...

Where Keats' metaphors often leave me cold, those in "Sleep and Poetry" work much better. It's certainly my favorite of the collection.

Keats' 1817 Poems is brief, and just barely worth reading through for the odd turn of phrase that stands above the rest, but for those who want the executive summary: read "Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison", "On first looking into Chapman's Homer", and "Sleep and Poetry", and leave the rest, unless you especially like the style of early Keats. ( )