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Home  »  English Poetry II  »  537. On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

John Keats

537. On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer


MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

—Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez—when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.