On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold," the sonnet begins, and the traveller is a twenty-year-old medical student who has no Greek. One autumn night Keats sat up with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, reading George Chapman's Elizabethan Homer aloud until daybreak and shouting with delight at the passages that thundered. He walked home through the sleeping streets of London, and by ten that morning the finished sonnet was waiting on Clarke's breakfast table. Fourteen lines hold the whole shock of it. Homer, whom Keats had known only in Pope's polished couplets, suddenly speaks "out loud and bold," and the reader becomes an astronomer watching a new planet swim into his ken, then an explorer on a peak in Darien, gazing at the Pacific for the first time. That the poem names the wrong conquistador does not matter in the least. The silence of those men, looking at each other "with a wild surmise," is the truest picture ever made of a book opening the world.