On “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”1

E.J. Hutchinson

John Keats​’s “​On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer​” is a poem about the discovery of new
terrains of the imagination made possible by the translation of great works into one’s mother
tongue.

The “Chapman” referred to in both the poem’s title and the poem itself is ​George Chapman​, the
Elizabethan poet who was the first to translate the entirety of Homer’s two epics, the ​Iliad​ and
the ​Odyssey​, into English; having been begun in 1598, they appeared in full in 1616. Exactly two
hundred years later, in 1816, his project was immortalized forever by Keats’s poem. It goes like
this:
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.

In formal terms, the poem is a s​ onnet​, specifically, a variation of the Petrarchan sonnet; its
rhyme-scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. The verbal music of the poem is very pleasant,
which one can hear by reading it out loud (stop now and do this), but here I want to talk more
about what it says than about how it says it.

When I said above that the poem was about “discovery,” the term was not fortuitous--for, as we
shall see in a moment, Keats is assimilating or adapting the language of scientific and
navigational discovery (he lived both after and in a great period of such discoveries) to literary
exploration.

1
​This essay first appeared at ​Mere Orthodoxy​ (13 August 2019):
https://mereorthodoxy.com/first-looking-chapmans-homer/​.
One notices this adaptation from the opening line: “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold.”
It sounds like an adventure after ​Eldorado​. One catches it, too, in the references to ​Hernán Cortés
and ​Darién in Panama​. (Panama was actually explored by ​Vasco Núñez de Balboa​ rather than
Cortés; but even Homer nods.)

As one reads the poem, however, he realizes that Keats isn’t talking about “literal” exploration at
all. It’s a metaphor for his wide reading--entirely appropriate for a poet.

But there’s a catch: Keats does not have immediate access to all the greatest poems. Notice the
transition from lines 1-4 to lines 5-6. In the first four lines, ​Keats​ has travelled. He has ​seen
many states and kingdoms. He has ​been​ around many islands (“which bards in fealty to Apollo
hold” is our first clue--besides the title of the poem--that we are talking about texts and not
topography). This is the conceit of autopsy: he has seen it all himself, has taken it in as an
eye-witness--been there, done that.

But then he says: “Oft of one wide expanse ​had I been told​.” He’s now in the realm of rumor, of
hearsay. This is an expanse he doesn’t know at first-hand. And what is this realm? It is the realm
“that deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne.” (“​Demesne​” is an archaism for “domain.”) And
so Keats only knew about Homer by reputation--that is, he only knew of him this way “till I
heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”

It may helpful to note at this juncture that ​Keats didn’t know Greek​. His only avenue into
Homer, then, was via translation. And the vividness of Chapman’s rendering exercises a
powerful effect on him. Keats is careful not to collapse entirely the distinction between
translator and author; it is ​Chapman​ that he hears speak in the first instance, not Homer.

But a good translation is like a window into the original, so much so that, even when he hears
Chapman​ speak (the auditory conceit again; cf. “had I been told” above), it is ​Homer’s​ domain
whose atmosphere he breathes. This is a manifest heightening of the metaphor: hearing is in
some sense external, but through the image of “breath” Keats is now able to incorporate Homer
into his very self, to internalize him. When reading a translation, one does not get only the
original--but, somehow, one does get the original.

This experience gives Keats the ​frisson​ of a great scientific discovery, almost beyond the
capacity of the verbal (“Then felt I”). He is analogous--so he seems to himself--“like some
watcher of the skies,” a line that was later used as the title of a ​Genesis song​, “when a new planet
swims into his ken” (another archaism ​meaning​ “range of sight or vision”). The r​ eference​ is to
the d​ iscovery of Uranus by Sir William Herschel in 1781​.
Or maybe it gives him the ​frisson​ of a great exploratory discovery, like C
​ ortés (actually Balboa,
as noted above) discovering the Pacific. Observe how the visual metaphor dominates: when he
hears Chapman speak, Keats becomes like a “watcher”; the object is in his “ken”; he is like one
with “eagle eyes” and “stares.” Keats, that is, reunites the sundered metaphors of the first six
lines, sight and sound, vision and speech. Chapman’s speaking now gives him a vision, a new
“realm of gold” (presumably not a coincidence in line 1 given the presence of the New World in
the latter half of the poem) in which to travel.

But there is a further paradox. The union of sight and speech has a dumbfounding effect.
Cortés’s men “look’d at each other with a wild surmise--​silent​.” One gathers that Keats’s
initiation into the Homeric mysteries occasioned a similar reaction of happily bewildered and
overawed quietude. It is not going too far to imagine that his breathing of Homer’s “pure serene”
took his breath away. And all this from a translation of a poem written 2500 years before his
time.

There are things that translations can’t do. They can’t serve as the foundation, for example, for
academic work on ancient texts. But there is much that they can do. They can introduce a reader
to new territories, new literary geographies. They can be an aid to help readers without the
requisite languages to realize in some degree why books that have the reputation of being good
are, well, good. Of perhaps at least equal importance, they can be fun, a way to discover, or
rediscover, ​the joys of reading​ in the works of artists and thinkers who would otherwise be
closed off and inaccessible to us. In doing so, one also often discovers something about oneself,
in a way that is personally as significant as the discovery of Uranus or the Pacific Ocean. They
can help us see even familiar texts in a new light, as Emily Wilson’s recent ​Odyssey​ or Sarah
Ruden’s ​Confessions​ so successfully do. For all of these reasons, translations are valuable, as
Keats reminds us, while making his own miniature work of art in the process.

(I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t add as an addendum: if given the opportunity, as Keats
wasn’t, you should still learn Greek!)