Weekly Response 1 - Chapman's Homer by Keats

"Perhaps [the Russian Formalists] most famous general claim is that literary language consists of an act of defamiliarization, by which they mean that such literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed. We are forced to see things that had become automatic and overly familiar in new ways." (Literary Theory: An Anthology, page 3-4)

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold."
(Lines 1-4)

What evidence does Keats's poem On First Looking into Chapman's Homer lend to the Russian Formalists theory? In other words, when thinking of this theory and analyzing the poem, does their theory seem to ring true?

We can infer from the title that the poem will be about Keats's first experience of reading Chapman's translations of Homer's works. This idea seems pretty straightforward, and one might expect the rest of the poem to work in this way; Keats takes the language, though, and twists it to make it unfamiliar to the audience. Upon reading the first line of this poem for the first time, I had no idea what Keats was talking about. I wasn't sure what he was referring to when he said realms of gold, and reading on, wasn't sure what these many "goodly states and kingdoms seen" were all about. I thought that he actually meant traveling, so I assumed that he had actually seen realms of gold and goodly states and kingdoms. But then I went back to the title and thought about what the poem was actually about, which is reading something for the first time, more specifically, reading Chapman's translations for the first time. And it hit me that if the poem is about reading, then the contents are probably about reading too, and that instead of actually traveling somewhere, Keats probably travelled there in a book and that's where he saw these realms of gold and goodly states and kingdoms. The same rings true for the third and fourth line as well. It seems as if he is saying that he actually went to western islands, but again, he is talking of reading. The language he uses to write of his experience, though, doesn't give the impression of a book, and so the idea is a bit unfamiliar, like the Russian formalists mention. Instead of reading the poem in a straightforward way, we must make inferences and play with the language that is given to us in order to discover what the poem is really about. In other words, we must learn to look at it in new light.