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Article: Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".(19th-century English poet John Keats)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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According to Walter Jackson Bate in 1963, in Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" "every possible echo [...] of Keats's reading" has been "exhaustively traced." [1] Yet one allusion to literary art has gone unnoticed. It occurs in, or rather consists of, the concluding extended simile, in which the poet says that, upon reading Homer in Chapman's translation, he felt
like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (l1-14) [2]
In this simile, form is indivisible from content.
As the sonnet moves from ...