On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

John Keats was a famous romantic poet from England. He was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorfields, son of the manager of a livery stable. His parents died when he was young so he had to live with his brothers and sisters. He began writing poems in 1814, when he was about 19 years old. Keats left school in 1811 to be apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Hammond. After four years he registered as a student at Guy’s Hospital. A year later he abandoned medicine to write poems all this life-time. Keats didn’t stop writing poems, even when he was nursing his brother Tom that was ill of tuberculosis. During this time Keats wrote “Isabella”. He wrote many poems which are still regarded as classics, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.” He spent his whole life writing more than 30 poems and died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821.

John Keats first great poem was written on the subject of one of his inspirations, Homer. One of Keats’ schoolteachers, Charles Clarke, introduced him to the George Chapman translation of Homer. Clarke and Keats stayed up all night reading Homer’s translated works and after Keats got home he sat down and wrote the first poem, which he finished the next morning and posted to Clarke in the mail. That poem was called ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.

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In this Keats makes particularly effective use of the natural division of the Petrarchan sonnet. The theme of exploration dominates the octave, with the metaphor of the poet as literary adventurer, and this followed by the theme of discovery in the sestet, with the use of similes through which Keats attempts to convey his wonder. The critical moment of the sonnet, the Volta which prompts the turn from one theme to the other, is the reading of Chapman’s Homer. The major theme of power and directness is shown particularly in the last four lines, with the sense of awe ...

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