When I was a junior in college, I took a class on Romantic Poetry, and I never recovered. 

Keats, in particular, captured me–sensitive, decadent, death-and-beauty obsessed Keats–and I remember that after reading his sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” I went to my favorite professor and told him that “I think I like poems with wind in them.” (That’s how Romantic I was back in those days).

I simply could not get over the images of wonder Keats expressed at the end of his sonnet when he attempted to describe how it felt to read a translation of Homer by George Chapman. He said he felt “like some watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken” or

Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Given that I’d spent my childhood exploring the forests of Alabama and then my college years hiking the foothills of South Carolina, I knew this overwhelming feeling of wonder well. I felt it most often when reaching a high outlook at the end of hard trail, and–like Keats–I also felt it when reading poetry.

That phrase, a “wild surmise,” seemed to me to be a perfect expression of what poetry did to me.

After college, when I became a high school English teacher, the Keatsian phrase continued to haunt me. I saw that my students (sadly) weren’t fans of poetry, and it became my goal–for the next twenty-seven years and counting–to instill in my students a “wild surmise” for reading poetry (and all literature). I think I had some success.

I don’t know how close I am to the end of my teaching career, but I know I’m over halfway done. So at this point in my teaching life, I thought I’d set down in writing some of the happier experiences I’ve had as a teacher and leave footprints (so to speak) of where I’ve been and the wonder I’ve encountered in case others want to travel some of those same paths in their reading either for themselves or with their own students.

I’ll be happy if anyone else finds these entries helpful, educational, or entertaining–but I’m also happy to do it just for me (and Keats). It will be comforting, in a way, to re-walk the trails that have given me so much joy.