22 pages • 44 minutes read
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
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Themes
The Ability of Art to Cause Epiphany
Written in the resonance of an epiphanic moment, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a celebration of that moment, of the art which inspired it, and, in a broader sense, of the boundary-shattering nature of the aesthetic experience. The octave is comprised of John Keats’s exuberant declaration, straight-forwardly celebrating Chapman and the widening expanse of Homer’s domain. In the sestet, however, Keats carefully defines his feeling though his choices in the extended metaphor, and in so doing reflects a concept that was vitally important to the Romantic movement: the sublime. Put forward by Edmund Burke in 1757, the sublime came to indicate a moment in which the profundity of existence is realized by the meeting of the subjective-internal (human emotion) and the objective-external (nature, primarily). The idea appealed to the Romantics, who sought truthful subjective experiences outside the increasing urbanity of the Industrial Revolution. Visually, the notion was represented by placing a small figure in the foreground while a colossal natural landscape rolled out before them, such as in Caspar David Fredrich’s famous painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted in 1817, the year after Keats’s composition of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
Keats responded to this same representational instinct when choosing the two similes that make up his extended metaphor. Both figures, the “watcher of the skies” (Line 9) and “stout Cortez” (Line 11), are depicted as witnesses experiencing awe amidst the vastness of nature. Their figures, introduced first and placed in our foreground, are overshadowed by the unfolding of their scenes, creating a similar resonance to Fredrich’s painting, and evoking the familiar Romantic notion of the sublime. And with each step, Keats comes closer to defining the figure in contrast to his environment. The vague “watcher” of Line 9, who is virtually lost in the watery skies of his observed universe, sharpens into a named explorer, on a named peak, though the onrush of detail and enjambment only deepen the sense of mystery and profundity experienced by Cortez.
Keats equates the epiphanic power of art with the recognition of the sublime in order to portray just how monumental a change is happening within him: the uncovering of something as vast as an ocean or a planet. In doing so, Keats defines the range of the epiphany Chapman’s translations have brought him, using the language of art to celebrate art and its ability to transport, to inspire, and to sustain the wandering and lost human soul.
Discovery Coupled with Artistic Inspiration
While the sestet provides the contextual frame for the sublimity Keats felt, the thematic resonance of the octave is just as vital. The notion of voyage and discovery are replete in the octave, with the first quatrain illustrating the voyage through “realms of gold” (Line 1) and “goodly states and kingdoms” (Line 2), and around “many western islands” (Line 3). The abundancy of travel is emphasized in the first word, “Much” (Line 1) and in the repetition of “many” (Lines 2, 3), saturating the first quatrain with varied imaginative locations. However, these are all qualified by the second quatrain, which focuses on discovery, first of Homer’s domain, and secondly of Chapman’s translation. These, in effect, provide the formula of Keats’s discovery, narrowing down to his point of contact with Chapman. This moment of discovery, replete with joy and wonder, is also laced with awe and inspiration. The poem itself is evidence of this, its overnight composition speaking to the surge of inspiration such discovery brings to its experiencer.
Much of Keats’s work is representative of the sublime in effect and his body of work substantiates its generative aspect. This same manner of carefully observing an external object and therein gaining a poetic epiphany that Keats follows in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is that which he follows for the rest of his life. Many of Keats’s famous odes occur as a direct result of his ecstatic attention encountering external stimuli. Keats evokes two other observers in his similes, neither literary, in order to bolster the sense of uncovering a new country in the octave. The discovery of new lands, new sights, new subjective experiences, is the invigorating energy that Keats recognizes within his observations, and feeds his work, such as, famously, in his composition of “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819).
Both the “watcher of the skies” (Line 9), an astronomer, and “stout Cortez” (Line 11), a conquistador, are figures of frontier exploration and are valorized for their work in helping humanity progress. This sense of progression is tied to the propulsive composition of the poem, for though Keats evokes static moments—Cortez’s first look, the astronomer’s first notice—the implication of each of these discoveries is that the work is simply beginning, that the brimming newness of the visions demand further exploration, further discovery, and what could be possible with continued human effort. In this sense, Keats celebrates Chapman’s work as a frontiersman, who, being one of the first to translate the Greek epics into English, wasn’t content to leave Homer to Arthur Hall’s pallid translation (1581), but took on the work in his own idiosyncratic nature, and in so doing, expanded the horizon for all artists who followed.
Keats’s Latent Ambition
Turning to Keats’s directly subjective experience with Chapman’s Homeric translations, a personal thematic stream is revealed in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The poem contains a propulsive aspect that carries it immediately back to the oldest known poet in the Western canon and then forward through the Age of Discovery to the late-18th-century discovery of Uranus. But the motion is not arrested at the moment of Keats’s reading of Chapman’s translation, rather it extends forward, into Keats’s unknown future, adding another “Silent” (Line 14) expanse to the work.
An undercurrent of excitement runs through the poem, particularly in the octave, where Keats delights in describing the realms of literature he is familiar with. It is not his familiarity that he celebrates, however, but rather the jarring of this familiarity, the sudden gust of new winds into territories long known. This defamiliarization allows Keats to breath the “pure serene” (Line 7) of Homer, but also to recognize the poetic potential that lay undiscovered in his lines. Under Chapman’s tutelage, Keats is not only learning a new way to read Homer, but is experiencing a new mode of poetic speaking, one of realizing the familiar world in a wholly new fashion. As mentioned previously, this is the same approach Keats takes in his monumental odes a few years later—defamiliarizing a Grecian urn, or a nightingale’s song, or the Elgin marbles.
That spark of ambition undergirds “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and can be witnessed as Keats, consciously or unconsciously, aligns himself with Cortez and the “watcher of the skies” (Line 9), holding himself up to those who have realized great acts upon the earth. The poetic potential that fires in his breast feels as gigantic as discovering a new planet or being the first European to see the boundaries of a continent. This ambition to greatness is coupled with the excitement and sublimity of beauty, offering a portrait of the poetic soul that Keats was forging within.
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