Poem of the Day

Keats, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'

John Keats wrote the following poem after an evening devouring George Chapman's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Keats develops the idea of the reader as voyager or astrologer, discovering new worlds through his encounter with the literature of the past. The importance and immediacy of a personal experience is stressed - the speaker of the poem 'had [...] been told' about Homer, but the first hand experience of his work is revelatory.

Much have I travel'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;
But of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne;
Yet could I never judge what men could mean,
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
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the poem's publication in December 1816, and 2016 is also the quartercentenary of the publication of Chapman's full translation of Homer, the first to appear in English, in 1616.