Could someone tell me the meaning of Chapman's Homer by John Keats?

Question

Just a simple summary.

Answer 1

Written when he was 21, this sonnet by John Keats refers to his reading (with his friend and former tutor Charles Cowden Clarke) of a translation of Homer by the Elizabeth playwright George Chapman. Chapman was a contemporary of Shakespeare, whose translation had some of the plain earthiness of that era. At the time of Keats' writing, more classical translations, which were more polished but also more pedantic, were better known.

Clarke, the son of Keat's former teacher, who was a bit older than Keats and had assisted his father in teaching the young man, had found the Chapman translation. He and Keats spent the night reading it, and on his long walk home in the early hours of the morning, Keats composed the sonnet, and Clarke found it as his breakfast table the next morning as a kind of thank-you note.

Of course, the sonnet is famous for its extended analogy in the octave, comparing the reading of the classics to traveling and exploring "many goodly states and kingdoms." The sestet then compares his discovery of Chapman's Homer to the explorer discovering the Pacific Ocean for the first time. (Of course, Keats misremembers the American history he has just been reading and attributes the discovery of the Pacific to Cortez rather than Balboa, but the force of the metaphor is just as powerful.)

The Wikipedia article cited below has an excellent explanation of the allusions in the poem as well as the critical reception it received.

Answer 2

Yes, it was a new translation of a Homer epic poem (or maybe both The Iliad AND The Odyssey, both of Homer's epics) by a man named Chapman. Keats was very impressed by the brilliant translation(s).

Answer 3

take a look at studying the poem a couple of instances, in unique moods, and in unique atmospheres. learn it at unique speeds. attempt to realize matters like punctuation and capitalization. poems are so brief that the creator makes use of all of those instruments to get his/her factor throughout. additionally, attempt to seem beyond so much matters. extra ordinarily than now not, a poem's phrases don't honestly imply what they might probably imply in an everyday dialog.. this detail is known as ambiguity, many writers apply it to rationale, and those who do not ordinarily do it via mistake.