3 - George Chapman's Translation: An Elizabethan Homer?

Summary

John Keats first encountered Chapman's translation of Homer in October 1816 at the age of 20 through his friend Charles Cowden Clarke:

One scene I could not fail to introduce to him – the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the Odysseis, and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares upon reading the following lines:

Then forth he came, his both knees falt ‘ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak'd his heart through …

According to Cowden Clarke's account, Keats stayed with him until dawn and by ten o'clock the same morning sent round to him a poem: which is the famous sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’:

Much have I travelled 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-browed 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

Looked at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Looked at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien. However, for all the lavish praise Keats bestowed on the translation on first encountering it, there is nothing in his letters and papers to suggest an unusually close or sustained engagement with either Homer or Chapman. The correspondence for August 1820 even shows that he had to buy a copy of Chapman's works for a friend to replace one which he had borrowed and then lost (worse still, the lost copy may have been a 1616 First Edition).

Moreover, in its turn Keats's poem has often been misunderstood.