Chapman · 1816
Keats reads Chapman's Homer through the night
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.
It is shortly after ten in the evening of an unrecorded day in October 1816, in the first-floor lodgings of Charles Cowden Clarke at 8 Clerkenwell Green, two doors south of the Clerkenwell-Green church of St James, in the working London autumn-evening candlelight through the north-facing room. He is twenty years old. He is John Keats, born at the Swan and Hoop livery-stables of his grandfather John Jennings at 24 The Pavement, Moorgate on 31 October 1795, son of the livery-stable manager Thomas Keats (who had died in a horseback fall in 1804 when John was eight) and Frances Jennings (who had died of tuberculosis in 1810 when John was fourteen).
On the Cowden Clarke writing-table in front of them is the folio-edition of Chapman's Iliad (the small printer-and-engraver-and-bookseller George Bishop printing of 1611, The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. Never before in any languag truely translated. With a Comment uppon some of his chiefe places, Donne according to the Greeke by George Chapman) that the Charles Cowden Clarke family book-collection has lent for the evening reading-session.
He thinks: the Chapman Iliad is the foundational pre-Pope English-language Homer-translation. The small post-1715 Alexander Pope Iliad of 1715-and-1720 is the standard small Augustan-and-Hanoverian working Homer-translation that the Enfield Academy and the Guy's Hospital apprenticeship reading has been working with. The small Chapman Iliad is, on the evening reading-experience working register, a more direct and small more vigorous rendering of the Greek source-material than the post-1715 Pope rendering, on the Chapman fourteener-line working metric and the Chapman vocabulary-of-physical-action choices.
He and Cowden Clarke read the Chapman Iliad through the Clerkenwell-Green evening from ten to two in the morning, then through the two-to-six small night-shift continuation in the same small Clerkenwell lodgings. Cowden Clarke records in the post-1860 small memoir-of-Keats publication (Recollections of Writers, 1878) that the Clerkenwell reading covered the Iliad-of-Chapman books-one-through-seven across the eight-hour reading session, including the Achilles-and-Briseis quarrel of Book One, the Catalogue-of-Ships of Book Two, the Paris-and-Menelaus single-combat of Book Three, and the Hector-and-Andromache parting at the Scaean Gate of Book Six.
Keats walks home through the London dawn from Clerkenwell Green to his Dean Street lodgings near Guy's Hospital (about a two-and-a-half-mile walk via Clerkenwell Road, Holborn, Newgate Street, St Paul's Churchyard, Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, the Strand, and the Borough High Street across the London Bridge) on the arrival-back-at-Dean-Street working time of about six-thirty in the morning. He sits down at his Dean Street writing-table on the immediate-arrival working state of small post-night-reading excitement, and writes across the subsequent forty minutes the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer: Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; through to the closing tercet Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
He sends the handwritten sonnet to Cowden Clarke at the Clerkenwell Green address by the morning-post; Cowden Clarke shows it to Leigh Hunt at the Examiner magazine office at the Hampstead Vale of Health that small same Sunday afternoon; Hunt publishes the sonnet in The Examiner of Sunday 1 December 1816 on the Hunt editorial-decision to publish the Keats-as-new-poet announcement. The small Keats-and-Cowden-Clarke Clerkenwell evening of October 1816 is now generally regarded as the foundational small breakthrough-moment of the Keats poetic-career and (with the Wordsworth-Coleridge 1797-1798 Quantock-Hills small literary-friendship of the Wordsworth-and-Coleridge collaboration) one of the two foundational moments of the English Romantic-poetic-movement small literary-friendships canon. Keats himself dies of tuberculosis at the Piazza-di-Spagna Rome lodgings on 23 February 1821 at twenty-five; the Chapman Iliad folio that Cowden Clarke had lent him is preserved at the Keats House Hampstead in the permanent Keats-and-Romantic-period working library collection.