On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a sonnet by the English poet John Keats. It was first published in The Examiner on Dec. 1, 1816, and describes Keats’s awed reaction to Elizabethan playwright George Chapman’s startling translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Keats’s lyric poem is informed by the Romanticism movement, of which he became a chief practitioner in its late form, despite his brief life.

The poem is the most famous of Keats’s early works and illustrates the transformative power of poetry on the young poet, and, in a broader sense, the ability for art to inspire epiphany in those who encounter it. Written while Keats was still in school, years before he wrote his series of Great Odes in 1819, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is an early example of Keats’s ecstatic attention, in which his poetic vision examines an external object with Romantic breadth, coupling its physical reality with a rarified nature that Keats could singularly perceive.

Poet Biography

John Keats was born in 1795 to a hostler (stableman) in Moorgate, London. While his youth was marked by outbursts of extreme emotion and volatility, he soon matured into a promising young surgeon. He wrote his first extant poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, when he was 19, inspired by contemporary second-wave Romantic poets Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. By 1815 Keats had resolved to become a poet, though he stayed in medical school until 1817. Keats’s first collection, Poems, was also published in 1816, and while it did not garner much critical acclaim, it introduced his work to luminaries of the English Romantic movement such as Samuel Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who recognized Keats’s latent genius.

Hunt, the first to publish a Keats poem, (“O Solitude” in 1816), went on to publish an essay introducing both Keats and Shelly as young poets to watch, as well as the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816). In the spring and autumn of 1819 Keats wrote six odes that were to enshrine him in the English poetic canon, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” but the loss of his brother to tuberculosis and mounting financial problems otherwise occupied him, and the odes, coupled with a few longer works, comprised his final collection Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which was published in 1820. The collection garnered little critical reaction at the time, though it is now widely considered a hallmark work of English Romanticism. Riddled with tuberculosis and crushed by the reception of his work, Keats travelled to Rome in order that its climate might assist his healing, but instead, he died on February 23, 1821.

Poem Text

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I 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.

Keats, John. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Poetry Foundation. 1816.

Summary

Keats reflects on his previous reading experiences, likening the different settings to “realms of gold” (Line 1) and “goodly states and kingdoms seen” (Line 2), before turning to the earliest literature in the canon, the Grecian epics. The “western islands” (Line 3) to which he has travelled are those in the Aegean Sea where the Grecian epics are set, and Keats credits the storytellers of the realm, the “bards in fealty to Apollo” (Line 4), the ancient Greek god of poetry and medicine, with his familiarity.

More so than any other of these bards, Keats owes his familiarity to Homer, whose works The Iliad and The Odyssey Keats describes as a “wide expanse” (Line 5) that were alone Homer’s “demesne” (Line 6), or domain. Despite this familiarity, however, Keats confesses that he was not granted the supreme aesthetic experience of the works, the “pure serene” (Line 7), until he read George Chapman’s 1616 translations, whose earthy and vigorous language seemed to “speak out loud and bold” (Line 8).

Keats is awed at the experience and compares it to the sublimity felt by an astronomer, a “watcher of the skies” (Line 9), who discovers a new planet. Keats goes on to compare this vast wonder to the “Silent” (Line 14) astonishment felt by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men, when they first glimpsed the Pacific Ocean from a Central American peak “in Darien” (Line 14), or Panama.