I know "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a classic description of the ability of art to create emotional epiphanies in a reader, but I never realized how much Keats sounds like a kid reading his report to the class and going way overboard praising the book because he obviously hasn't read it.

SOME GUY, KEATS PROBABLY: my god, sir knight
what has happened to you?
you look like some sort of lake without sedges
a sedgeless lake
if such a thing can even be imagined
no sedges on you
a sedgeless man

The Toast's literary pilgrimages archive can be found here. When you live across the ocean from where your favourite stories are set, Europe can seem nearly as imaginary as Middle Earth. London and Paris are real, but in my mind they exist as an amalgam of stories. Pure text doesn’t provide the sensory cues of visual media, so it demands that readers participate in creating the world of the story. It’s an intimate act of collaboration, a…