Chapman

In October 1816 the twenty-year-old John Keats, then a junior apothecary's apprentice at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, was lent by his Enfield-Academy schoolfriend Charles Cowden Clarke an early-seventeenth-century folio copy of George Chapman's 1611 translation of The Iliad (Chapman the Elizabethan-and-Jacobean playwright and Homer-translator who had completed the Iliad in 1611 and the Odyssey in 1614 on a four-decade working-translation programme of post-Marlowe English-Renaissance hellenist verse). Keats and Cowden Clarke read the Chapman Iliad through the night at Cowden Clarke's small lodgings on Clerkenwell Green from ten in the evening through to six in the morning. Keats walked home through the dawn streets to his Dean Street lodgings near Guy's Hospital, sat down at his desk on his arrival, and wrote across the next forty minutes the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (published in The Examiner of Sunday 1 December 1816 on Leigh Hunt's small Examiner-magazine editorial decision), the foundational Keats poem of the November-1816 working breakthrough that opened the four-year Keats-poetic-career period. The small Keats sonnet is now generally regarded as the foundational small fourteen-line breakthrough-moment of nineteenth-century English Romantic poetry.

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