On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a sonnet by the English poet John Keats. It was first published in The Examiner on Dec. 1, 1816, and describes Keats’s awed reaction to Elizabethan playwright George Chapman’s startling translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Keats’s lyric poem is informed by the Romanticism movement, of which he became a chief practitioner in its late form, despite his brief life.

The poem is the most famous of Keats’s early works and illustrates the transformative power of poetry on the young poet, and, in a broader sense, the ability for art to inspire epiphany in those who encounter it. Written while Keats was still in school, years before he wrote his series of Great Odes in 1819, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is an early example of Keats’s ecstatic attention, in which his poetic vision examines an external object with Romantic breadth, coupling its physical reality with a rarified nature that Keats could singularly perceive.

Poet Biography

John Keats was born in 1795 to a hostler (stableman) in Moorgate, London. While his youth was marked by outbursts of extreme emotion and volatility, he soon matured into a promising young surgeon.