John Keats wrote the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It records his astonishment after encountering George Chapman’s vigorous English translation of Homer, especially the Odyssey, rather than merely repeating the polished versions familiar to many educated readers of Keats’s time.
Keats encountered Chapman’s Homer through his friend Charles Cowden Clarke. According to Clarke’s recollection, they read the translation together through the night, and Keats produced the sonnet soon afterward in October 1816. The poem was first published in The Examiner on 1 December 1816 and later appeared in Keats’s 1817 collection Poems.
The sonnet is a Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet: its octave presents Keats as a literary explorer, while the sestet turns to the revelation produced by Chapman’s translation. The famous comparisons to a newly discovered planet and to an astonished explorer convey the shock of artistic discovery.
A common mix-up concerns the poem’s geographical imagery. Keats names Cortés and Darien, although the historical details blend Cortés’s Mexican experiences with Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s sighting of the Pacific. That error does not alter the poem’s authorship or central literary achievement.