Now that Rick is offering a learned and deeply-felt defense of Eliot, may I offer an off-handed defense of Keats?

Lots of readers sent me emails making the point that John Derbyshire makes below, namely that in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” Keats makes a schoolboy’s mistake, identifying “stout Cortez” as the first to set eyes on the Pacific, when it was actually Balboa who did so. But our boy Keats doesn’t actually say any such thing. Not exactly, anyway. All he does is give us an image of Cortez and his men struck dumb at the sight of the Pacific—a response they might well have had even if they’d had the ocean charted out at their maps. And since Keats is describing his sense of wonder at discovering the world of Homer–a world that was new to him—the parallel with Cortez strikes me as entirely valid. (The adjective “stout” even strikes me as valid, indicating, not a fatty, but a man of courage and strength.)