Keats’s emphasis—that it was Chapman’s voice, and not Homer’s only, that he heard speak out loud and strong—exposes a gulf between him and us. It has implications for literary culture, English poetry, and the survival of the Classics.

Keats knew perfectly well that in reading Chapman’s Homer he was not reading the Iliad. Those rolling rhymed fourteeners, those pauses and those plunges, those metrical inversions: that is Chapman’s sound, not Homer’s. Yet Keats was pleased rather than perturbed. Chapman’s job, he knew, was not to give us Homer, who exists nowhere but in the original Greek. Not that Chapman was writing an autonomous poem in English, ontologically independent of Homer’s. But neither did he produce a crib, and much of what is good in Chapman’s translation can be understood as distinct from what it strictly owes to Homer. An original energy crackles in the relation between Chapman’s English and the Greek on which it draws. In particular, Keats seems to have been responding to Chapman’s sweeping Elizabethan truculence and vigor, as against the refinement and relative tidiness of Pope’s Iliad, the more recent and then-dominant version. A translation can hardly be expected to give the original, but a great translation can give much else, and Keats’s sonnet shows he knew the difference, and knew how gratefully to receive the gifts that Chapman had to give.

To see the translator as an artist, and to take his translation on its own terms as a work of art: