On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

The latter half of the 18th century was tumultuous for the social fabric that had long sewn together English and European culture. The 1776 American revolution and the French revolution of 1789, setting the stage for Napoleon’s rise, shattered the illusions of strength in Empire and of national destiny. These insecurities were further underscored by the massive social upheaval caused by the ongoing Industrial Revolution, which saw huge numbers of people moving from rural to urban settings, losing contact with the traditions and values that had guided their ancestors for generations. By the time of John Keats’s birth in 1795, deep changes had happened in terms of the individual’s relationship to society, and a discontentedness with modernity and popular productions had taken root. English Romanticism would come to embody many of these values—the want to return to nature, the longing to study subjective experiences alone. Keats’s reaching back to Chapman’s 200-year-old translation can be seen as a dissatisfaction with the offerings of contemporary society.

Keats’s poem covers a vast span of time, with the octave—the first eight lines—taking the reader back to the Homeric era, before intoning the Elizabethan period of Chapman’s translation.