On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Keats's generation was familiar enough with the polished literary translations of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, which gave Homer an urbane gloss similar to Virgil but was expressed in blank verse or heroic couplets.
[1] Charles Cowden Clarke had been lent a copy of Chapman’s Homer that was circulating around friends of Leigh Hunt,[1] co-founder and editor of The Examiner.
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 stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The second quatrain introduces "one wide expanse" that was ruled by Homer, but Keats had only “been told” of it as he could not read the original Greek[7] (most cultured Englishmen of the time were only familiar with Latin).
The reference to a "new planet" would have been important to Keats’s contemporary readers because of the recent discovery of Uranus with a telescope in 1781 by William Herschel, Court Astronomer to George III.
[8] Keats may have read about Herschel’s discovery in the last chapter[9] of a book he won while at Enfield Academy,[10] an Introduction to Astronomy by Johnny Bonnycastle (published 1807).
Members of Vasco Núñez de Balboa's expedition were the first Europeans to see the eastern shore of the Pacific (1513), but Keats chose to use Hernán Cortés.
When, with infinite toil, they had climbed up the greater part of the steep ascent, Balboa commanded his men to halt, and advanced alone to the summit, that he might be the first who should enjoy a spectacle which he had so long desired.
As soon as he beheld the South Sea stretching in endless prospect below him, he fell on his knees, and lifting up his hands to Heaven, returned thanks to God, who had conducted him to a discovery so beneficial to his country, and so honourable to himself.
The standard critical view is that Keats simply remembered the grand but separate images of Cortés and of Darien, rather than their historical contexts.
It is filled with a sense of wonder, inspiration, joy, excitement, adventure and possibility at discovering the amazing made accessible (in Herschel’s and Cortés’s findings, Chapman’s English).
[1] After the main idea has been introduced and the image played upon in the octave, the poem undergoes a volta (here “Then felt I…”), a change in the persona's train of thought.
