To understand Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, we must understand it with reference to Edmund Burke’s “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. In “On First Looking”, the poet-narrator experiences amazement and wonder upon reading Chapman’s translation of Homeric works for the first time. Among these feelings of awe, we identify a characteristic of Keats’ poetry, the sublime. Burke defines the sublime to be that which creates “ideas of pain and danger” (4). We hence understand Keats’ poem to be describing a sublime experience. The poet-narrator experiences a sensation of passion as a reaction to the sublime experience of reading Homer’s works. In this essay, I will argue that Keats invokes Burke’s sublime within “On First Looking”, by means of vastness and infinity.
In Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry”, he defines one source of the sublime as such:
Another source of the sublime is infinity; if it does not rather belong to the last. Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime. But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so. (Burke 8)
Burke acknowledges that while there are “scarce any things” that are truly infinite, there are phenomena which imply the existence of infinity, invoking the feeling of the sublime. He gives the example of the human eye: as it is not able to see further than a certain range, the world seems to be infinite, giving an illusion of infinity. The human mind, unable to comprehend the vastness of infinity, becomes confused, terrified and insignificant. We see Keats invoke this sense of infinity within the first quatrain of “On First Looking”:
“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.” (Keats 1-4).
Keats’ octave serves as a build-up to his sublime experience reading Chapman for the first time. We understand it to be an account of the poet-narrator’s literary reading to date, as the “realms of gold” refer to the intellectual and emotional richness they gain through literature. Every sentence in the four lines shares a common consonantal /l/ sound in “travell’d”, “realms”, “gold”, “Apollo”. The /l/ sound has a luxurious quality, implying that treasure is central to the poet-narrator. The treasure or “gold” is a metaphor for literature and the rewards for studying it. Keats hints at the notion of infinity when he writes that the poet-narrator travels through “realms of gold”, “goodly states and kingdoms” and “many western islands”. All these descriptions do not clearly define specific boundaries and regions. As the eye is not able to perceive boundaries, it creates the illusion of infinity as the poet-narrator does not know the limits of how much they can travel, both figuratively, in the form of reading, and geographically, in the form of travel.
Bruce Hayman also notes that Keats creates a sense of awe in the reader by his placing of modifiers at the beginning of sentences in the octave. Keats uses the modifiers “much” and “round many” to begin his sentences in the first octave. Hayman argues that Keats uses modifiers at the beginning of his sentences so that “the reader may tend to inhale at those modifiers before reaching the subject-verb core of the sentence” (Hayman 2), the result being a “rhythmic and syntactical compression released” when the reader reaches the main verb. We see that Keats’ deliberate inversion of subject-verb-modifier creates a sense of confusion and uncertainty in the reader when they embark on the reading of each line. As they begin reading each sentence in the first octave, it is not immediately clear to the reader what the subject is. This uncertainty corresponds to Burkes’ ideas of the sublime. Burkes posits that that which is “dark, uncertain, confused, terrible” is “sublime to the last degree” (8). We hence observe that Keats invokes feelings of the sublime in the octave of “On First Looking” by creating the illusion of infinity and inverting syntax to create uncertainty in his readers.
As the poem continues, Keats once again conjures images of the sublime to elevate and contrast Homer’s poetry. After establishing that the poet-narrator has read widely in the “realms of gold” (1) that is literature, Keats continues that “Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne” (5-8). Once again, Keats inverts the subject-verb modifier, using the modifiers “Oft of” and “deep-brow’d” before the subject-cores of each line, “wide expanse” and “Homer”. Keats achieves an effect of suspense and uncertainty in the reader, mirroring the poet-narrator’s wonder at reading Chapman’s Homer for the first time. Keats shifts from the earlier imagery of “goodly states and kingdoms” (2) and “western islands” (3) to a more ambiguous metaphor of the “wide expanse” (5) which Homer has domain over. The earlier imagery is concrete and grounded in geographical terms, whereas a “wide expanse” is clearly shown to be one with no boundaries. Keats implies Homer’s poetry to be so far-reaching that its reach seems to be boundless, implying Burkean infinity. The poet-narrator cannot define the immense reach of Homer’s poetry, hence giving the illusion of infinity. Later in the poem, Keats switches to the simile instead of the metaphor, first referring to “the skies” then “a new planet” (9-10). This switch of figure of speech, from metaphor to simile, evokes Homer’s use of the epic simile (Thomas 1). This switch of figure of speech represents the change of subject from the “realms of gold” that are literature to Homer’s poetry. Simultaneously, Keats elevates Homer’s poetry by incrementing the size of his similes, from “states” to “planet” (Keats 9). Paul H. Fry writes:
In other words, then, the new poet surrounds all the others, dwarfs them to the status of gems on his own surface; and whereas their worlds were worldly – wealthy, luxuriant and sublunary – this poet’s world encompasses the entire cosmos” (Fry 18).
The “new poet”, that is to say Homer, overshadows all the “realms of gold” of literature that Keats has traversed. Where the metaphor for literature come in the form of “states” (Keats 2), “islands” (3) and “kingdoms” (4), Keats contrasts and elevates Homer’s poetry through the use of the new simile. The poet-narrator describes the experience of reading Homer as being “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (9-10). Keats’ new use of the simile dominates the earlier descriptions of literature before reading Homer. Fry posits that as Keats’ earlier descriptions of literature are “wealthy, luxuriant” (Fry 18), the new world encapsulated by Homer’s poetry “encompasses the entire cosmos”, as seen by the planet simile. Keats also likens the experience to being Cortez seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time over the peak in the Darien mountain range (Keats 10). Reading Chapman’s Homer becomes a moment of discovery and awe, similar to European explorers seeing the vastness of the seas for the first time. Once again, Keats invokes the sublime through the imagery of the vastness of “planet” and the Pacific Ocean. As Burke writes in “Philosophical Enquiry”:
Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime. This is too evident, and the observation too common, to need any illustration: it is not so common to consider in what ways greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity, has the most striking effect. (Burke 9)
Keats depicts the imagery of the boundless, seemingly limitless Pacific Ocean in his poem. The ocean is both vast in “extent” and “quantity”. The poet-narrator no doubt experiences terror and the sublime in the face of such vastness of dimension. In comparison to the vast, wide expanse of Homer’s poetry, the poet-narrator becomes insignificant and trivial. Keats shifts from using the first person “I” pronoun to describing himself in the third person, as “some watcher of the skies” (Keats 10). The poet-narrator shifts from the active voice narrating his travels through literature to the passive voice as his “mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other” (Burke 6). He becomes a mere observer who is dwarfed by the depth and vastness of Homer’s literature.
Despite the terror caused by the sublime vastness of Homer’s poetry, Burke also acknowledges that it causes pleasure and passion as well. While Burke defines the sublime to be that which excites ideas of pain and danger, he also argues that “at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful” (Burke 4). Keats achieves this effect in “On First Looking” in the sestet, where he distances the poet-narrator from the subject of Homer’s literature. He uses the simile to describe himself as a “watcher” (Keats 9) and “stout Cortez” (11). Keats hence achieves a twofold effect. The first is to emphasise the poet-narrator’s feelings of insignificance when faced with the monolithic nature of Homer’s works. The second is the creation of distance between that vastness which excites pain and danger. This distancing is what allows the poet-narrator to have a sublime experience that is not mere terror but also astonishing and pleasurable as well.
In conclusion, we see that Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry” is key to understanding how Keats invokes feelings of wonder in the face of terror within “On First Looking”. Keats depicts a sublime experience within his poem by hinting at the illusion of infinity and the great depth and vastness of Chapman’s Homer.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. “An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. HL2004 Sensibility and Romanticism Course Reader AY 2020-2021, edited by Katherine Blyn Wakely-Mulroney, Nanyang Technological University, 2020, pp. 3.
Fry, Paul H. “The Possession of the Sublime.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 26, no. 2, 1987, pp. 187–207. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600646. Accessed 10th Nov. 2020.
Hayman, Bruce. “Rhythm and Syntax in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 43, Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc., 1994, pp. 24–27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30210465.
Keats, John. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”. HL2004 Sensibility and Romanticism Course Reader AY 2020-2021, edited by Katherine Blyn Wakely-Mulroney, Nanyang Technological University, 2020, pp. 24.
Richards, Tad. “On First Looking into Starbuck’s ” ‘Keats’ “Chapman’s ‘Homer’ ” ” ’.” The North American Review, vol. 250, no. 5/6, University of Northern Iowa, 1965, pp. 14–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25116254.