Keats and LSD

This talk will take a fresh look at one of Keats’s best-known and well-loved poems, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816). This sonnet, first published in Leigh Hunt’s 'The Examiner', marked Keats’s debut as an aspiring poet, and critics have universally praised the poem’s celebration of the joys of reading the classics in translation. Keats was from a humble ‘Cockney’ background and this poem’s frank confession of his literary ambitions and educational limitations is widely admired as a display of Romantic sensibility.

However, the perspective of LSD (spoiler alert – it is not what you think) produces a very different interpretation of the poem, and takes us into challenging cultural, geographical and ethical regions, with some profound implications for British Romanticism as a whole. Join Professor Ian Haywood to learn more.