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 5
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; 10
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.  
 
 

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer — Keats wrote this early poem in October of 1816, after a night of reading from George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s works with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who was the son of his schoolmaster. (Clarke later became a published expert on Shakespeare, among other topics.) George Chapman (1559-1664) was an Elizabethan playwright who translated both The Iliad and The Odyssey. In Keats’s time, the most popular translation of Homer was by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who published his version of The Iliad in six yearly volumes from 1715 to 1720, and who collaborated (though he initially tried to claim sole authorship) on a version of The Odyssey in 1725. Another celebrated version was by John Dryden (1631-1700), who had made a partial translation that appeared in 1700.

Whereas Pope and Dryden were classical scholars as well as writers, Chapman was (like Shakespeare) a working playwright. Chapman’s translations are less elegant and smooth than Pope’s, but what they lose in sophistication they arguably make up for in vigor.
 
western islands — On one hand, this refers to islands in the Aegean (west of Troy) where Apollo was venerated; on the other, because Keats never traveled to Greece and had not, when he wrote this, yet been out of England, this may be a sly reference to the British Isles, with the “bards in fealty to Apollo” referring to English poets, many of whom admired Hellenic Greek culture and literature.
 
Apollo — One of the major Hellenic Greek gods, Apollo was associated at different times with light, truth, prophecy, music, and healing.
 
demesne — personal estate (related to domain)
 
loud and bold — Keats here contrasts the poetic voice he hears in Chapman with the other versions with which he had heretofore been familiar.
 
planet — In 1781, William Herschel, using a telescope of his own design and construction, discovered the planet Uranus. It was the first planet ever discovered, given that all of the planets out to Saturn can be seen with the naked eye. He made many more discoveries of scientific importance over the course of his life, but obviously being the first to discover a new planet is what he is most remembered for.
 
Cortez — Hernán Cortes, Spanish explorer and conqueror. Many (including supposedly Clarke himself) have pointed out that the discoverer of the Pacific was not Cortes but Vasco Núñez de Balboa. For a long time, people assumed Keats had simply made a mistake. However, more recently some critics have argued that Keats refers to Cortes intentionally, because just as Cortes had not been the discoverer of the Pacific but had gone to see it later, Keats was not the first to have read Chapman. Thus, his use of Cortes is arguably more appropriate.
 
Darien — (or Darién) a province in present-day Panama where Balboa first saw the Pacific Ocean