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atrocity. Dr. Johnson called the translation “a treasure of poetical elegances.” That was the problem.
    Keats had undoubtedly read Homer in Pope’s translation; there are echoes of Pope’s words in what Keats would write himself. But he was ready for something else. His life was constrained in the crowded and meager streets of south London, filled with the “money-mongering pitiable brood” of other Londoners. He had been to Margate with his brothers and had seen “the ocean” there in the pale shallows of the North Sea, but nowhere farther. In early October 1816 he went for the evening to see his old friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who was living with his brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. Cowden Clarke had been lent a beautiful big early folio edition of the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey made by the poet and playwright George Chapman.
    The two men began to look through its seventeenth-century pages. Clarke’s friend Leigh Hunt, who had just published in the Examiner the first of Shelley’s poems to be printed, had already praised Chapman in the August issue, for bottling “the fine rough old wine” of the original. In the next few days Keats was about to meet Hunt himself, with the possibility in the air that he too might swim out into the world of published poetry and fame. The evening was pregnant with the hope of enlargement, of a dignifying difference from the mundane conditions of his everyday life. To meet Homer through Chapman might be an encounter with the source.
    It is touching to imagine the hunger with which Keats must have approached this book, searching its two-hundred-year-old pages for something undeniable, the juice of antiquity. The two of them sat side by side in Clarke’s house, “turning to some of the ‘famousest’ passages, as they had scrappily known them in Pope’s version.” Chapman had produced his translations—almost certainly not from the Greek but with the help of Latin and French versions—between 1598 and 1616. Homer often seems to haunt the present, and Chapman himself had met him one day in Hertfordshire, not far from Hitchin, where Chapman had been born, Homer masquerading as “a sweet gale” as Chapman walked on the hills outside the town. It was a moment of revelation and life-purpose for him, so that later he could say, “There did shine, /A beam of Homer’s freer soul in mine.” The eighteenth century had not admired what Chapman had done. Pope had called it “loose and rambling,” and Chapman himself “an Enthusiast” with a “daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ before he arriv’d to Years of Discretion.” Dr. Johnson had dismissed it as “now totally neglected.” But Coleridge had rediscovered it. In 1808 he sent a copy of Chapman’s Homer to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, the woman he loved. “Chapman writes & feels as a Poet,” he wrote, “—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth … In the main it is an English Heroic Poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek.”
    Chapman’s distance, his rough-cut unaffectedness, stood beyond the refinements of the Enlightenment, as if he were the last part of the old world that Homer had also inhabited, before politeness had polluted it. Here the romantics found Achilles as the “fear-master,” and horses after battle which liked to “cool their hooves.” Cowden Clarke and Keats were hunched together over pages that were drenched in antiquity. Ghosts must have come seeping out of them.
    Something that had seemed quaint to the eighteenth century now seemed true to the two young men. They pored over Chapman together. “One scene I could not fail to introduce to him,” Cowden Clarke wrote