On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

John Keats begins by placing his reader in the realms of literature, as the poem’s primary purpose is to explore the transportive power of literature. Though Keats also makes something else explicit: Poetry has the power to preserve culture. The Homeric epics celebrated a culture roughly three thousand years before Keats’s time, and the conceit of travel that he uses in the first quatrain, “Much have I travell’d in realms of gold” (Line 1), is not literal. Even if Keats had travelled through the Aegean Sea—he didn’t—the culture he would have encountered would have been vastly different than what is confronted in Homer. His claim to have seen “many goodly states and kingdoms” (Line 2), or to have been “[r]ound many western islands” (Line 3), is metaphorical, and only possible though reading the Homeric poems.

The next quatrain makes clear, however, that the beauty of Homer was only revealed to Keats through Chapman’s translation. Beauty, the aesthetic experience, is vitally important to Keats. He would later develop this in his famous conclusion to the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)—again drawing inspiration from ancient Greek culture—and it can be thought of as a driving

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