Seeing through the ‘Burden of the Past’: Superior Belatedness in Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

Abstract

This article examines one of Keats’s earliest attempts in his poetic practice to wrestle with what Walter Jackson Bate famously called the ‘burden of the past’, the potentially crushing weight of previous examples of poetic and artistic greatness. In particular I reexamine Keats’s most important early sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, and his infamous reference to Cortez as an analogue for his own rapt discovery of the sublime Homer through Chapman’s translation. Since Tennyson’s note in 1861, this reference has most often been taken as a simple historical gaffe on Keats’s part, but I bring new weight to the line of criticism that takes seriously the intentionality of his choice of Cortez. I do so by showing how the ‘eagle eyes’ of Cortez and the ‘sick eagle’ in the ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ sonnet, written four months later, are linked together through a seldom-appreciated element in one of Keats’s key sources, Robertson’s History of America. In Robertson, Cortez was presented as being prevented from discovering the Pacific alongside Balboa due to illness, thereby missing an early chance at destiny only to be preserved for a later, even grander one. Keats thus aligns himself with the figure of Cortez not as the peaceable discoverer figure, but as the second-coming conquistador, a man set apart from his comrades by his eagle-eyed vision and a superior belatedness. Through Cortez, Keats turns his own secondariness to his advantage, aligning himself with a late-coming adventurer elevated not for his primacy but for his forward-looking vision and eventual destiny as a seizer of ‘realms of gold’.