Читать книгу The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters - Adam Nicolson - Страница 11

PARIS, 11 MAY 1863, Le Repas Magny, a small restaurant up a cobbled street on the Left Bank in the Sixième. Brilliant, literary, sceptical Paris had gathered, as usual, for its fortnightly dinner. The stars were there: the critic and historian Charles Sainte-Beuve; the multi-talented and widely admired playwright and novelist Théophile Gautier; the unconscionably fat Breton philosopher, the most brilliant cultural analyst of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan; the idealistic and rather intense Comte de Saint-Victor, a minor poet and upholder of traditional values; and observing them all the supremely waspish Jules de Goncourt, with his brother Edmond.

Magny’s restaurant stood at the head of the rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine on the Left Bank in Paris.

The Magny dinners, every other Monday, were ten francs a head, the food ‘mediocre’ apparently, everyone shouting their heads off, smoking for France, coming and going as they felt like it, the only place in Paris, it was said, where there was freedom to speak and think. Jules de Goncourt transcribed it all.

‘Beauty is always simple,’ the Comte de Saint-Victor said as the waiters brought in the wine. He had a way, when saying something he thought important, of putting his face in the air like an ostrich laying an egg. ‘There is nothing more beautiful than the feelings of Homer’s characters. They are still fresh and youthful. Their beauty is their simplicity.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Edmond groaned, looking over at his brother. ‘Must we? Homer, again?’

Saint-Victor paused a moment, went white and then very deep red like some kind of mechanical toy. ‘Are you feeling well?’ Goncourt said to him across the table. ‘It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.’

‘How can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so bottomless!’ Everyone laughed.

‘Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,’ Gautier said calmly. ‘They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.’

‘Any modern novel,’ Edmond said, ‘is more moving than Homer.’

‘What?’ Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.

‘Yes, Adolphe, that lovely sentimental love story by Benjamin Constant, the sweet way they all behave to each other, his charming little obsession with her, the way she doesn’t admit she wants to go bed with him, the lust boiling away between her thighs, all of that is more moving than Homer, actually more interesting than anything in Homer.’

‘Dear God alive,’ Saint-Victor shrieked. ‘It’s enough to make a man want to throw himself out of the window.’ His eyes were standing out of his head like a pair of toffee-apples.

‘That would be original,’ Edmond said. ‘I can see it now: “Poet skewers himself on street-lamp because someone said something horrid about Homer.” Do go on. It would be more diverting than anything that has happened for weeks.’

Chairs were shoved back from the table, somebody knocked over a bottle of wine, the waiter was standing ghoul-faced at the door, Saint-Victor was stamping and roaring like a baby bull in his own toy bullring, as red in the face as if somebody had said his father was a butcher and his mother a tart. Everyone was bellowing.

‘I wouldn’t care if all the Greeks were dead!’

‘If only they were!’

‘But Homer is divine.’

‘He has got nothing to teach us!’

‘He’s just a novelist who never learned how to write a novel.’

‘He says the same thing over and over again.’

‘But isn’t it deeply moving,’ Saint-Victor said imploringly, ‘when Odysseus’s dog wags the last sad final wag of his tail?’

‘You can always tell a bully,’ Edmond said quietly to his brother. ‘He loves dogs more than their owners.’

‘Homer, Homer,’ Sainte-Beuve was murmuring through the uproar.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ Jules said to Renan afterwards. ‘You can argue about the Pope, say that God doesn’t exist, question anything, attack heaven, the Church, the Holy Sacrament, anything except Homer.’

‘Yes,’ Renan said. ‘Literary religions are where you find the real fanatics.’

Homer loomed up again at another Magny dinner the following October. They were talking about God, whether God was definable or even knowable. Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, in all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. Uniquely itself, beautifully self-sufficient, not entirely to be understood, mysteriously attractive, mysteriously unattractive, wholly wonderful: what was not Godlike about the oyster? Rolling laughter swept up and down the table.

That was when Homer emerged. To the Goncourts’ horror, these modern, sceptical destroyers of faith, the most fearless critics of God that France had ever known, burst into a song of Homeric praise which made the brothers retch. The diners at le Repas Magny might have been partisans of progress, but all agreed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.

‘The long-tailed birds!’ [Hippolyte] Taine, [the philosopher and historian] cried out enthusiastically.

‘The unharvestable sea!’ exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. ‘A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?’

‘Unharvestable sea?’ What on earth did that mean? Renan thought some Germans had discovered a hidden significance in it. ‘And what is that?’ asked Sainte-Beuve.

‘I can’t remember,’ Renan replied, ‘but it’s wonderful.’

The Goncourt brothers sat back, regarding this mass expression of Homer-love with their habitual, jaundiced eye.

‘Well, what do you have to say, you over there,’ Taine called out, addressing them, ‘you who wrote that antiquity was created to be the daily bread of schoolmasters?’

So far the brothers had said nothing, and had let the Homer-hosannas go swirling around the dining room without comment, but now Jules said: ‘Oh, you know, we think [Victor] Hugo has more talent than Homer.’

It was blasphemy. Saint-Victor sat as upright as a fence-post and then went wild with rage, shouting like a madman and shrieking in his tinny voice, saying that remarks like that were impossible to stomach, they were too much, insulting the religion of all intelligent people, that everybody admired Homer and that without him Hugo would not even exist. Hugo greater than Homer! What did the Goncourts know? What idiot novels had they been producing recently? He shouted and screamed, dancing up and down the room like an electrified marionette. The Goncourts shouted back, increasingly loudly, raging at the little supercilious poet, who for some reason thought he was more in touch with the meaning of things than they ever could be, sneering at them down his peaky red nose, while they could feel nothing but contempt for the man they would think of forever after as the nasty stuck-up little self-congratulatory Homer-lover.

* * *

These conversations seem as distant as the Bronze Age. Where now is our violence on behalf of a poet? Who feels this much about Homer? The Goncourts, with their scepticism and their modernism, their contempt for antiquity, have won the day. Their prediction has come more than true: the ancient world is now the daily bread not of schoolmasters but of academics. Everyone has heard of Homer, probably of the two poems, and many have read some passages; but no one today ends up shouting at dinner about him. Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote, or the phrases that recur in them.

Why should they? The place of Homer in our culture has largely withered away. I can only say that, for me, the growing experience of knowing Homer, of living with him in my life, has provided a kind of ballast. He is like a beautiful stone, monumentally present, a paternal foundation, large, slightly ill-defined, male and reliable. He is not a friend, a lover or a wife; far more of an underlayer than that, a form of reassurance that in the end there is some kind of understanding in the world. Goethe thought that if only Europe had considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better.

That quality does not exist in some floating metaphysical outer sphere. It is precisely in the words he uses, and it is on that level that something like ‘the unharvestable sea’ is a beautiful expression. It is the twin and opposite of another of Homer’s repeated, metrically convenient, perfect and formulaic phrases, ‘the grain-giving earth’. And why is it beautiful? Because it encapsulates the sensation of standing on a beach and looking out at the breaking surf, and seeing in it the unforgiving brutality of the salt desert before you. Everything you are not stares back at what you are. It is a phrase which knows that, as you are looking out at that hostility, behind you, at your back, are all the riches that the earth might give, the olive and the grape, the security of home, the smell of cut hay, the barn filled with the harvested wheat and barley, the threshed grains, the sacks tight with them in the granaries, the ground flour, the bread at breakfast, the honey and oil. ‘The unharvestable sea’ – two words in Greek, pontos atrygetos – is a form of concentrated wisdom about the condition of life on earth. It states the obvious, but also provides a kind of access to reality, both painful and revelatory. All Homer is in the phrase.

Those words occur many times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, often poignantly. Almost at the beginning of the Odyssey Odysseus’s son Telemachus, at the end of twenty years’ waiting for his father to return, first from the war against Troy and then from his vastly extended and troubled journey home across the sea, has decided to go in search of him, to ask in the mainland of Greece, in Pylos and Sparta, if there is any news of the man most people now consider dead.

Homer, over the course of thirty-five lines, prepares the ground for the climactic words. Telemachus needs to get ready for his journey, and to do so he goes down into his father’s treasure chamber in the palace in Ithaca, his thalamos. Upstairs, all is anarchy and chaos. The young men who are living in the palace, clamouring to marry Telemachus’s mother Penelope, are eating up the goods of the household. But down here, like a treasury of the past, of how things were before Odysseus left for the wars half a lifetime ago, all is order and richness. Clothes, gold and bronze are piled in the chamber, but also sweet-smelling oils, wine, which is also old and sweet, all lined up in order against the walls. All the accumulated goodness of the land is in there. Telemachus, whose name means ‘far from battle’,^fn1 meets an old woman, Eurycleia, down here. She was his nurse as a child, feeding and raising him. Now that he is a man, she tends and protects these precious fruits of the earth. He asks her for the best wine to be poured out for him into small travelling jars, and for milled barley to be put into leather sacks. He must take the earth’s goods out on to the sea.

But Eurycleia – and the name of this private nurse, this tender of things, means ‘wide-fame’ – dreads Telemachus going where his father has gone to die. A wail of grief breaks from her when he tells her his plans, and she suddenly addresses him as she had years before:

Ah dear child, how has this thought come into your mind?

Where do you intend to go over the wide earth,

you who are an only son and so deeply loved?

Odysseus is dead, has died far from home in a strange land.

No, stay here, in charge of what is yours.

You have no need to suffer pain

or go wandering on the unharvestable sea.

Nothing could be clearer: the unharvestable sea is not to be visited. It is the realm of death. When Odysseus does finally come home (and Eurycleia plays a key role in that return), Homer has a one-word synonym for the sea: evil. The word she uses here for ‘wandering’ is also dense with implication: alaomai is used of seamen, but also of beggars and the unhomed dead. The unharvestable sea is where life and goodness will never be found. Everything Eurycleia has devoted her life to, the nurturing and cherishing of the goodness of home, has been the harvest of an unwandering life. The man standing in front of her is one of those fruits. The unharvestable sea is a kind of hell, and in that phrase the drama of his life, her life, Odysseus’s life, the life and death of those Ithacans who have not returned from Troy, of Penelope weaving and unweaving the cloth that will not be woven until Odysseus returns: all of it is bound up in pontos atrygetos.

For all the Goncourts’ wit and scepticism, I am on the side of Renan, and Hippolyte Taine, and Sainte-Beuve, and even the ludicrous Comte de Saint-Victor. Homer, the most miraculous and ancient of survivals in our culture, comes from a time of unadorned encounter with the realities of existence. It is absurd now to call the sea ‘unharvestable’, but it is also beautiful and moving. For all of Saint-Victor’s despised sententiousness, he was right in this. Homer’s simplicity, his undeniably straight look, is a form of revelation. Its nakedness is its poetry. There is nothing here of ornamentation or prettiness, and that is its value. ‘Each time I put down the Iliad,’ the American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote towards the end of his life,

after reading it again in some new translation, or after reading once more the somber splendor of the Greek, I am convinced, as one is convinced by the experiences of a lifetime, that somehow, in a way beyond the visions of artistry, I have been face to face with the meaning of existence. Other works of literature give this insight, but none so powerfully, so uncontaminated by evasion or subterfuge.

This book is driven by a desire to find the source of that directness and that understanding.

* * *

In the early autumn of 1816, John Keats was not yet twenty-one. He had been writing poetry for two years, living with other medical students in ‘a jumbled heap of murky buildings’ just off the southern end of London Bridge, working as a ‘dresser’ – a surgeon’s assistant – in Guy’s Hospital. He was miserable, good at his job but hating it, out of sorts with ‘the barbarous age’ in which he lived, filled with a hunger for life on a greater scale and of a deeper intensity than the ordinariness surrounding him could provide.

At school in Enfield, his headmaster’s son Charles Cowden Clarke, who had ambitions himself as a poet and littérateur, had introduced him to history and poetry, immersing him in Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. Clarke gave him the first volume of the great Elizabethan English epic, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and, as Clarke remembered later in life, Keats took to it

as a young horse would through a spring meadow – ramping! Like a true poet, too – a poet ‘born, not manufactured’, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, ‘what an image that is – “sea-shouldering whales”!’

When Keats at this age saw the wind blowing across a field of barley still in the green, he jumped on a stile and shouted down at Clarke, ‘The tide! The tide!’ Here was a boy, born the son of a London ostler, hungry for depth, for a kind of surging reality, for largeness and otherness which only epic poetry could provide. Poetry for him, as Andrew Motion has said, was ‘both a lovely escape from the world and a form of engagement with it’. It was not about prettiness, elegance or decoration but, in Motion’s phrase, ‘a parallel universe’, whose reality was truer and deeper than anything in the world more immediately to hand. Poetry gave access to a kind of Platonic grandeur, an underlying reality which everyday material life obscured and concealed. It is as if Keats’s sensibility was ready for Homer to enter it, a womb prepared for conception. All that was needed was for Homer to flood into him.

Perhaps at Clarke’s suggestion, he had already looked into the great translation of Homer made by the young Alexander Pope between about 1713 and 1726, the medium through which most eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Englishmen encountered Homer. But it was a translation that came to be despised by the Romantics as embodying everything that was wrong in the culture of the preceding age: interested more in style than in substance, ridiculously pretty when the Homeric medium was truth, a kind of drawing-room Homer which had left the battlefield and the storm at sea too far behind.

Where, for example, Homer had said simply ‘the shepherd’s heart is glad’, Pope had written

The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight

Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.

From the point of view of the 1780s, Pope’s Homer was about as Homeric as a Meissen shepherdess with a lamb in her lap.

This wasn’t entirely fair to Pope. His preface to the Iliad, published in 1715, is one of the most plangent descriptions ever written in English of the power of the Homeric poems. Northern European culture had been dominated for too long by the processed and stable maturity of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Latin epic par excellence, written in about 20 BC. Homer represented an earlier stage in human civilisation, a greater closeness to nature, to the potency of the sublime, a form of poetry which was not to be admired from afar but which would bind up its reader or listener in a kind of overwhelming absorption in its world. ‘No man of true Poetical Spirit,’ the young Pope had written, ‘is Master of himself while he reads him; so forcible is the poet’s Fire and Rapture.’ Translation was not a calm carrying over of the meaning in Greek into the meaning in English, but a vision of the processes of the mind as a flaming crucible in which the sensibilities of translator and translated were fused into a new, radiant alloy.

Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanked a roll-call of the eighteenth-century British great – Addison, Steele, Swift, Congreve, a string of dukes, earls, lords and other politicians – but for all that, his entrancement with Homeric power is not in doubt. Homer was like nature itself. He was a kind of wildness, ‘a wild paradise’ in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he described came into being.

What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action … The Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,

They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it.

This inseparability of Homer and his world is what excited Pope. It seemed to him like a voice from the condition of mankind when it was still simple, quite different from ‘the luxury of succeeding ages’. Poetic fire was the essential ingredient. ‘In Homer, and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.’

Pope grasped the essential point: unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a pre-classic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.

Virgil bestows with a careful Magnificence: Homer scatters with a generous Profusion. Virgil is like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream: Homer like the Nile, pours out his Riches with a sudden Overflow.

In this preface to the Iliad, Pope can lay claim to being the greatest critic of Homer in English. But what of his translation? Was he able to bear out this deep understanding of Homer’s ‘unaffected and equal Majesty’ in the translation he made? Perhaps not. Take for example a moment of passionate horror towards the end of the Iliad. For most of the poem Achilles has been in his tent, nursing his grievance and loathing against Agamemnon, but now that Patroclus, the man he loved, has been killed by Hector, Achilles is out to exact revenge. He is on his blood-run, gut-driven, pitiless, the force of destiny. Among his enemies on the field, he encounters a young Trojan and looks down on him with the vacancy of fate. The young warrior stares back up:

In vain his youth, in vain his beauty pleads:

In vain he begs thee, with a suppliant’s moan

To spare a form and age so like thy own!

Unhappy boy! no prayer, no moving art

E’er bent that fierce inexorable heart!

While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,

The ruthless falchion [a single-edged sword] oped his tender side;

The panting liver pours a flood of gore,

That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.

‘It is not to be doubted,’ Pope had written in his own preface, ‘that the Fire of the Poem is what a Translator should principally regard, as it is most likely to expire in his managing.’ But that is what has happened here. Apart from what Leigh Hunt, the great liberal editor of the Examiner, called Pope’s trivialising, ‘cuckoo-song’ regularity, he has lost something else: Homer’s neck-gripping physical urgency. In the Greek everything is about the body. The boy crawls towards Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles’s ears that are deaf to him, his heart and his mind that remain unapproachably fierce. The boy puts his hands on Achilles’s knees to make his prayer, and then the sword goes into the liver, the liver slipping out of the slit wound, the black blood drenching the boy’s lap and ‘the darkness of death clouding his eyes’. Nothing mediates the physical reality. Homer’s nakedness is his power, but Pope has dressed it. ‘The panting liver … pants no more’: that is so neat it is almost disgusting, as if Pope were adjusting his cuffs while observing an 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 meagre 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 further. 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, the heroic editor of the Examiner, in which he had just published 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 we 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. It is a repeated experience with Homer that he 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 it. 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 later,

the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the ‘Odysseis’ [Chapman’s transliteration of the Greek word for Odyssey], and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:

Then forth he came, his both knees falt’ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak’d his heart through.

It is the most famous meeting between Homer and an English poet. Keats had read and stared in delight, shocked into a moment of recognition, of what the Greeks called anagnōrisis, when a clogging surface is stripped away and the essence for which you have been hungering is revealed.

At this stage Odysseus has been at sea for twenty days. For nearly two hundred lines he is churned through the pain Poseidon has wished on him.

Just as when, in the autumn, the North Wind drives the thistle tufts over the plain and they cling close to each other, so did the gales drive the raft this way and that across the sea.

The sea is never more vengeful in these poems, never more maniacally driven by violence and rage. The raft is overturned and broken, the giant surf hammers on flesh-shredding rock. It is one of Odysseus’s great tests. His name itself in Greek embeds the word odysato, meaning ‘to be hated’, and that adjective appears twice in this storm. He is the hated man on the hateful sea. This is his moment of suffering, and the sea he sails on is loathing itself.

Throughout the Odyssey he is the man of many parts, inventive, ingenious, with many skills and many gifts, but here is merely polytlas, the man who dares many things, suffers many things and endures many things. Only when a goddess-bird and then Athene herself come to his aid can he finally drag himself to the shore.

Here in a virtually literal translation is what Homer says as Odysseus emerges from the surf:

he then bent both knees

and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea had killed his heart.

Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozed much

up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless

lay scarcely-capable, terrible weariness came to him.

The Greek word Chapman translated in The sea had soak’d his heart through – the phrase which Keats loved so much – is dedmēto, which means overpowered or tamed. It comes from a verb, damazo, of immensely ancient lineage, its roots spoken in the steppelands of Eurasia at least six thousand years ago, used to describe the breaking-in of animals and later the bending of metal to your desires and needs. It is essentially the same word as ‘tame’ in English, or domo in Latin, the word for reduction, to kill in a fight, to domesticate and dominate. But in the Iliad it also appears as a word for seduction, or more likely the rape of girls. Young girls, enemies, heifers and wives are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea has done for him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.

Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge:

his knees no more

Perform’d their office, or his weight upheld:

His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell’d:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;

And lost in lassitude lay all the man.

On a sofa? you might ask.

Others have tried and failed: ‘For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,’ wrote Professor A.T. Murray in 1919; ‘Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,’ was E.V. Rieu’s Penguin post-war bestseller prose version in 1946; ‘his very heart was sick with salt water’, wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; ‘The sea had beaten down his striving heart,’ his successor Robert Fagles in 1996.

Keats was right. None approaches ‘The sea had soak’d his heart through,’ perhaps because Chapman’s English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus’s heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinaded corpse, blanched and shrivelled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedmēto: Odysseus’s sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.

Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings – his ‘beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings’ – with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o’clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.

On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer

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.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:

Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud, and bold.

Then felt I like some Watcher of the Skies

When a new Planet swims into his Ken,

Or like stout Cortez, when with wond’ring eyes

He star’d at the Pacific, and all his Men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent upon a Peak in Darien –

It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman’s Homer; it’s about first looking into Chapman’s Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging on to what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.

Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortez, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his night of revelation, it had been

Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

which is politer and not entirely concordant with what the rest of the poem aims to mean. Further than that, he had borrowed the verb and the key adjectival noun from Pope’s Iliad:

The troops exulting sat in order round,

And beaming fires illumined all the ground.

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,

When not a breath disturbs the deep serene …

Keats, on the verge of his twenty-first birthday, even as this sonnet was announcing his new discovery of Homeric depth and presence, had not shrugged off that eighteenth-century inheritance.

For all that, coursing through the sonnet is a sense of arrival in the world of riches, a sudden shift in Keats’s cosmic geometry, moving beyond the drabness and tawdriness by which he felt besieged. Keats had become everybody in the sonnet’s fourteen lines: the astronomer, himself, Chapman, Homer, Cortez and ‘all his Men’. All coexist in the heightened and expanded moment of revelation. Pope had found fire in Homer; Keats discovered scale. And scale is what then entered his poetry, as a kind of private and tender sublime, the often agonised heroics of the heart, in which, just as in Homer, love and death engage in an inseparable dance.

Homer, or at least the idea of Homer, pools into Keats’s poetry. Hostile Tory reviewers in Blackwood’s Magazine started to call him ‘the cockney Homer’, but in Endymion, the long poem he had been contemplating when he wrote the Chapman sonnet, and which he began the following spring, his experience of that night with Cowden Clarke shapes the core phrases. People remember the poem’s beginnings:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

That is poetry as balm, even, as Andrew Motion has said, as medicine, the discipline which Keats was now abandoning for life as a poet. Keats went on to describe the ways in which beauty manifests itself in the world, the consolations it provides in ‘Trees old and young’, ‘daffodils/With the green world they live in’, streams and shady woods, ‘rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms’. But then, at the centre of this first part of the poem, drenched in memories of Shakespeare’s sweetest lyrics, comes this, the bass note of a Homeric presence, a sudden manliness, a scale of imagined beauty that encompasses the depths of the past:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead.

Homer is the foundation of truth and beauty, and Keats was happy to say that ‘we’ had imagined his poetry. Homer will enlarge your life. Homer is on a scale that stretches across human time and the full width of the human heart. Homer is alive in anyone who is prepared to attend. Homerity is humanity. Richmond Lattimore, making his great version of the Iliad in the late 1940s, when asked ‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ replied: ‘That question has no answer for those who do not know the answer already.’ Why another book about Homer? Why go for a walk? Why set sail? Why dance? Why exist?