Lyric Life

Keats takes the wonder and awe of a translation of Homer gives to introduce himself to the world--and to prove that great poetry undoes itself at every turn. This early sonnet, as ambitious as anything he ever wrote, tests the very limits of his medium, poetry, by encoding gaps in its own thoughts, sentences that require the reader to fill them in--and finally, to leave us in a place of silent community, the way the best poetry should, once it exhausts language.