In a Slate.com review of Richard Holmes’s new book on Romanticism and science, the reviewer notes a reference to astronomer William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in one of John Keats’s sonnets:
In Keats’ sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” the poet compares his feeling of literary discovery with that of “some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken”; as [Richard] Holmes explains, this was an allusion to [William] Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, one of the stories told at length in The Age of Wonder.
