The Love of Intellect

    For creative people throughout history, their lone sanctuary from the world’s madness has been found in the love of the intellect.
    It offers solace and fulfillment to the soul when all else turns to ashes.
    It amazes, inspires and opens an unimaginable world of wonder to those who seek it out. 
    Over the centuries, many poets have attempted to honor the glory and wonder of the intellectual life, but few came close….
    For me, Romantic poet John Keats summed it up most beautifully in his poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”.   
    The poem goes like this:

 

    Much have I travelled 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.
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne

 
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise
    Silent on a peak in Darien.

 

Comments

[American Daughter]

In your top two posts, you have mentioned two of my favorites. I have always loved the way Hopkins used alliteration to evoke the imagery. In a strange way he used words somewhat as Dylan Thomas did. They didn't invent them, but they combined them in haunting ways.

I've also felt like Keats standing on a peak in Darien, when I first understood calculus. In the moment of retracing the mental footsteps of Leibniz and Kepler, I thought of that phrase in the Keats poem.

Those were the days! We were young, we were in college, and our hearts were on fire.

[ClubPenguinCheats]

In a strange way he used words somewhat as Dylan Thomas did. They didn't invent them, but they combined them in haunting ways.