Reading Response - Chapman's Homer

In John Keats’ dedication to George Chapman, Keats uses his rhyming scheme strategically to guide the reader through his own experience. For example, he begins with the line “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold”, and leaves it by itself, orphaned at the beginning of the piece. Three lines later, he brings it together with “Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.”, effectively finishing the thought of the phrase. He uses this technique again, with the same rhyme pattern, to encapsulate between ‘told’ and ‘bold’, effectively creating three segments of the poem.

The first segment elucidates an idea. The “stanza” is riddled with phrases evoking royalty, but some decidedly cliched phrases by our time (they may not have been so in his time, but I suspect they were common). “Realms of gold”, “goodly states and kingdoms”, and “fealty to Apollo” all ring of nobility and wealth and beauty, but are more general in nature. This is a poetic faux pas, according to Kooser, but I believe in Keats poem, the rules are intentionally broken to make a point (which I'll explain as it comes). In a sense, Keats builds a generic (but beautiful) throne with words.

In the second “stanza”, he proceeds to place Homer on the throne he’d just finished creating, but lets him rule for only one part of a sentence, before knocking him off and replacing him with Chapman, who loudly and boldly presents the classic Homer tales in his own elegant way, of which Keats clearly approves.

Finally, to finish, and taking the entire next six lines of the poem, Keats re-describes (now) Chapman’s kingdom. He casts aside the general descriptions in favor of more specific or original images (most of which couldn’t have occurred to Homer due to them not being discovered or recognized until well after his death). A kingdom becomes a planet to a watcher of the skies, Cortez makes an appearance, that seeker of gold, who in the process of his search conquered a new world (not coincidentally only 40 years prior to George Chapman's own birth). He leaves us with a sensation of that secret and shared understanding between conquerors, that we have discovered something new and beautiful in an old world.

The tension is between Keats and an imaginary crowd who proclaim Homer as the greatest storyteller of the Greek myths. Keats begins the journey as a believer, someone who understood the same truth which everyone else believed. He makes the transition when he experiences Chapman’s work to believing that perhaps what he was told was a lie. This is the pivotal moment as the central conflict resolves into the falling action, a moment of serenity atop the mountain of Darien.