Reading Elizabethan playwright George Chapman's translations of Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" inflamed John Keats' poetic imagination on an autumn evening in 1816.
Chapman's vernacular language so exhilarated Keats and his friend George Cowden Clarke that they stayed up all night feverishly reading the flowing iambic poetry of Shakespeare's contemporary.
Later translations by Alexander Pope and John Dryden sought to elevate Homer into refined English, but Chapman's earthier version awakened Keats' ambition to write great poetry.
Penn classics professor Emily Wilson said after the publication of her translation of Homer's "The Odyssey" in 2017 that she sought to attract readers like the young Keats. Her rendition reached a broad audience, including many who had never before discovered Homer’s ancient epic.
Wilson's translation of Homer's "The Iliad" comes out next week. As with her "The Odyssey," Wilson's new translation will excite new readers of Homer, as Chapman's language electrified the 20-year-old Keats.
Keats' sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," one of his first great poems, expresses his joy at the Elizabethan writer's language.
Anticipating his great odes of the spring of 1819, Keats wrote the poem the morning after reading Chapman for the first time. The poem was published in the Examiner on Dec. 1, 1816, 200 years after the publication of Chapman's Homer.
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
By John Keats
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.
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