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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. More 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, Cortés 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 agonized 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 center 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?

 
    3 • LOVING HOMER
    Homer-love can feel like a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every