On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

The latter half of the 18th century was tumultuous for the social fabric that had long sewn together English and European culture. The 1776 American revolution and the French revolution of 1789, setting the stage for Napoleon’s rise, shattered the illusions of strength in Empire and of national destiny. These insecurities were further underscored by the massive social upheaval caused by the ongoing Industrial Revolution, which saw huge numbers of people moving from rural to urban settings, losing contact with the traditions and values that had guided their ancestors for generations. By the time of John Keats’s birth in 1795, deep changes had happened in terms of the individual’s relationship to society, and a discontentedness with modernity and popular productions had taken root. English Romanticism would come to embody many of these values—the want to return to nature, the longing to study subjective experiences alone. Keats’s reaching back to Chapman’s 200-year-old translation can be seen as a dissatisfaction with the offerings of contemporary society.

Keats’s poem covers a vast span of time, with the octave—the first eight lines—taking the reader back to the Homeric era, before intoning the Elizabethan period of Chapman’s translation. The Iliad and The Odyssey deal with subject matter that was considered legendary at their time of composition, which has been roughly determined to have occurred around 750 BCE on the Ionian peninsulas. Homer’s subject matter was further distant in time; indeed, the culture to which he was referring had fallen during the Greek Dark Ages (1100 BCE-750 BCE) and the poems themselves were nostalgic reflections of a largely vanished people. The Trojan War, the primary engagement with which the poems are concerned, likely occurred in the 12th- or 13th-century BCE.

For a period of time, the Homeric works were unknown in a direct manner in Western culture, existing in only a few manuscripts, but Homer was rediscovered during the Renaissance and translated into French and Italian. It was from a French version that Arthur Hall, an English MP, first translated Homer into English in 1581. Playwright George Chapman, contemporary (and potential rival) of Shakespeare, began to publish his loose and idiosyncratic version of Homer in 1589 in installments, and in 1616, his celebrated The Whole Works of Homer was released and became the de-facto translation for the English-speaking world. It would not be superseded in popularity until John Dryden’s 1700 translation. Alexander Pope’s 1715 version assumed the popular crown and remained so through Keats’s time.

The sestet—the final six lines—is rooted in the Age of Discovery. Again, Keats moves backwards in time, with the first event occurring in 1700s while the second event took place in 1513. The initial simile “like a watcher of the skies” (Line 9) likely refers to an event that took place within the recent memory of many of Keats’s readers—though Keats himself was born 14 years afterwards. In 1781, for the first time since antiquity, a new planet was discovered when William Herschel, a Court Astronomer to George III of England, trained his telescope on the constellation of Gemini and uncovered the steady passage of Uranus. News of this discovery bought Herschel instant fame and shocked much of the world, whose universal model had been confidently thought complete for generations.

Keats’s now-famous figure of “stout Cortez” (Line 11) is complicated in many senses. Hernán Cortés (for the purposes of clarity, this guide will hereafter refer to him as Cortez) was a Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the downfall of the Aztec empire and overtook much of mainland Mexico for the King of Castile. An apocryphal moment in which he surveyed the Valley of Mexico in 1519 is likely the event Keats was thinking of when he placed Cortez in his poem. Alfred Lord Tennyson was the first to point out Keats’s error in placing Cortez in Darien when in fact it was Cortez’s contemporary, Balboa, who was first to look upon the Pacific in 1513 from the Panamanian peak. Keats’s knowledge of both events was informed by his reading of William Robertson’s History of America (1777), which contains a particularly lush description of Balboa’s first view of the Pacific, as well as Cortez’s moment in 1519. (Cortez would eventually see the Pacific in 1524.) Keats likely conflated the two events in the inspirational rush of composition that followed his reading of Chapman’s Homer. Though Keats may not have been as mistaken as is regularly supposed, his use of Cortez, the second expedition leader to see the Pacific, may be a subtle acknowledgement of not engaging with Homer directly, but instead through Chapman’s secondary vision.

A contemporary reading of this poem, with wider knowledge of the ravages of colonialism that were visited upon Central America by the Spanish conquistadors, further complicates the figure of Cortez, and likely reduces him as a valorous figure. Keats’s interpretation of the event, while not totally absent of the European Conqueror model, does not move to question motivations for the moment, but only to enact its awe, its quiet realization of something greater than singular human want. Keats’s views on the darker, inhumane aspects of the Spanish conquest of the Americas are unknown, though, given the common rhetoric of the time, it is unlikely that Keats would have viewed Cortez’s westward advance in a negative manner.