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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 prose version, in the bestseller published by Penguin 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,” Lattimore’s 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 marinated corpse, blanched and shriveled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedm ē to : 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
    Â Â Â And many goodly States and Kingdoms seen;
    Â Â Â Round many Western islands have I been,
    Which Bards in Fealty to Apollo hold.

    Keats’s draft of his Homer Sonnet, written in October 1816.
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
    Â Â Â Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:
    Â Â Â Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud, and bold.
    Â Â Â 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
    Â Â Â He star’d at the Pacific, and all his Men
    Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
    Â Â Â 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 onto 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 Cortés, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when