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Darien Prospects in Keatss On First Looking into

Chapmans Homer

Dana Van Kooy

To cite this article: Dana Van Kooy (2015) Darien Prospects in Keatss On First
Looking into Chapmans Homer, The Keats-Shelley Review, 29:2, 128-145, DOI:
10.1179/0952414215Z.00000000062

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Published online: 02 Sep 2015.

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the keats-shelley review, Vol. 29 No. 2, September 2015, 128145

Darien Prospects in Keatss On First

Looking into Chapmans Homer
Dana Van Kooy
Michigan Technological University, USA

Since its initial publication in the pages of Leigh Hunts The Examiner, John
Keatss On First Looking into Chapmans Homer has elicited period- and
field-defining criticism. Hunt printed the poem as an example of a new
school of poetry. John Gibson Lockharts famous response in Blackwoods
Edinburgh Magazine framed its reception within a conservative personal
attack that fixed the poems geo-historical and aesthetic prospects to its
young author (an easier target). In this essay, I examine Keatss Chapmans
Homer sonnet as a reformulation of the eighteenth-century prospect poem.
Highlighting the poems multiple prospects, its formal elements, as well as
its deployment of aesthetic and cultural technologies, I identify Keatss son-
net as a performative play of historical perspectives that mediate between
the past, the present, and the future. The Darien Prospects in On First
Looking into Chapmans Homer offer readers multiple views from which to
survey the imperial violence that structured Keatss contemporary moment;
however, the poem also mobilizes the rhetoric and the aesthetics of place
and locality to produce alternative spatial performances that subvert the
captivating legacies of imperialism.

keywords Keats, prospect poem, sonnet, history, post-Napoleonic era, Atlantic,

Pacific, Mediterranean, poetic translation, Chapmans Homer

In a world where satellites traverse the skies and GPS navigation systems direct our
travels, it is easy to conceive Western culture and its accompanying technology in terms
of a wandering eye [or] a traveling lens.1 Western literature and history are replete
with characters defined by their global peregrinations and a culturally embedded
hegemonic gaze that sees without being seen. Familiar to readers of seventeenth- and

1
Donna J. Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991),
pp. 183201 (p. 192).

The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0952414215Z.00000000062

 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 129

eighteenth-century prospect poems, viewers of eighteenth-century landscape paintings,

and those who have read Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1977),2 where the
hilltop prospect takes the more threatening form of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon, the
prospect has long provided the illusion of unrestricted and objective vision. While the
hilltop is prominent in many Georgic and Pastoral poems as well as more than a hand-
ful of Romantic-period sonnets, its seemingly static positioning veils the shifting direc-
tionality and fragmentary nature of its vision. Foucaults discussion in Discipline and
Punish makes clear how this gaze represents a formidable matrix of power and knowl-
edge that we increasingly associate with colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. To
borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, Benthams Panopticon represents a mechani-
cal reproduction3 of the natural or hilltop prospect. Foucaults analysis follows this
line of reasoning, suggesting how technological innovation replicates, refines, and even
appropriates poetic and aesthetic practices. Paul Virilio takes Foucaults critique a
step further in Speed and Politics,4 where he argues that geographical impediments
and boundaries (rivers, mountains, oceans) are no longer relevant because technol-
ogy effectively flattens global topography into a GPS screen. Satellites, missiles, and
instant communication systems negate the relevance of the global terra-aqueous land-
scape because these technologies allow individuals and governing bodies to navigate it
through virtual dimensions of space and outer space. Modern and contemporary pros-
pects appear more sinister, even inviolable, and yet, they also promise more people
access to more precise information. This basic contradiction, which does not amount
to a contrast between the technology and nature or art and technology, raises impor-
tant questions about the prospects various forms and the available interpretive frame-
works, especially when considering those prospects created on the cusp of modernity.
The idea of the prospect informs cultural narratives and provides ways of seeing,
knowing, and making. Paintings, poems, prison architecture, and weapons and navi-
gational systems make visible technical, historical, cultural, political, and philosophi-
cal epistemes and as such the prospect represents a cultural and aesthetic practice
that shapes how people view and interpret information. Foucaults and Virilios work
suggests that the prospect shapes cultural fantasies, particularly imperial fantasies
that span historical periods and encompass large geographical expanses. Prospects
provide viewers with a means of perceiving cultural topography but, as W.J.T.
Mitchell suggests in his discussion of imperial landscapes, this perspective invariably
suppresses or occludes those fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsup-
pressed resistance.5 Fully to comprehend the ideological and the historical signifi-
cance of the prospect, one must, according to Mitchell, examine both the prospects
view as well as the less visible fractured images. Together, he writes, they constitute
2
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (1977; New York:
Vintage, 1995).
3
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Benjamins
concern, like mine here, is with shifting aesthetic practices and aesthetic values, more specifically, how art
works navigate between oppressive ideologies and utopian dreams.
4
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans.by Mark Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2006).
5
W. J. T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, Landscape and Power, ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1994), pp. 534 (p. 10).
130 DANA VAN KOOY

a landscape that might be seen more profitably as something like a dreamwork of

imperialism, unfolding in time and space from a central point of origin and folding
back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and
fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.6 Mitchells
idea of an imperial landscape or dreamscape is most easily comprehended as a net-
work of cultural practices and codes that both represent and function as a medium
wherein cultural histories and utopian possibilities are formulated and contested.7
Mitchells approach to landscape offers an alternative in-road to prospect poetry
and, in particular, to John Keatss famous sonnet, On First Looking into Chapmans
Homer, first published in Leigh Hunts Young Poets article in The Examiner on
1 December 1816.8 Keatss poem reconstructs and reformulates the prospect poem as
a vital aesthetic technology that allowed for the transformation of a poetic tradition
into a more obvious method of reproducing and reconfiguring historical and literary
knowledge. The poetics of Keatss Chapmans Homer sonnet are revelatory and
anticipatory rather than nostalgic. The poem invokes the past and simultaneously
breaks with it in its reproduction of multiple imperial dreamwork[s]; it thus creates
opportunities for audiences to formulate new and alternative spaces in which to imag-
ine the future. In order more fully to understand how and why Keats composes this
poem, I begin this essay with an examination of how the eighteenth-century prospect
poem evolved into the Romantic-period prospect sonnet. William Lisle Bowles was
arguably the first writer to compose these sonnets in his 1789 Fourteen Sonnets, writ-
ten chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Tour. Wordsworth and Coleridge adapted
this sonnet form and subsequently influenced how Keats wrote his sonnets. In his
Chapmans Homer sonnet, Keats creates an impression of spatial coincidence that
collapses historical eras into the space of a moment, into now. Like a GPS device,
the sonnet flattens a vast geo-historical landscape, revealing imperial fantasies along
with the more subversive and fractured images to which Mitchell refers. In the time it
takes to speak or read fourteen short lines of poetry, Keats depicts three related sea-
centered empires: the classical and imperial Mediterranean world of the Greeks and
Romans; the trans-Atlantic empires of Spain and Britain; and an alternative future
represented by the Pacific.
Keats invokes the first of these imperial landscapes through allusions to Homers
The Odyssey. As many readers are aware, On First Looking into Chapmans Homer
celebrates an evening when Charles Cowden Clarke and Keats sat down with a beau-
tiful copy of the folio edition of Chapmans translation of Homer.9 George
Chapman (15591634) and Alexander Pope (16881744) provided Keats with a
choice of translations through which to c o n s i d e r t h i s c u l t u r a l foundation

6
Mitchell, p. 10.
7
Mitchell, pp. 12.
8
Leigh Hunt, Young Poets, The Examiner, (1 December, 1816), pp. 76162. Reprinted in the Selected Works
of Leigh Hunt, General Editors: Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra; Volume Editors: Jeffrey N. Cox,
Greg Kucich, Charles Mahoney, and John Strachan, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), II, p. 73.
Hereafter, SWLH. The review has been reprinted in the Norton edition, Keatss Poetry and Prose, ed. by Jeffrey
N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 1114. Hereafter KPP.
9
Mary Cowden Clarke and Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (New York: C. Scribners Sons,
1878), p. 128.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 131

for empire in the Western hemisphere. Clarkes account of this evening high-
lights his and Keatss discussion of specific passages from The Odyssey. Comparing
these translations as Clarke and Keats did on that fateful evening, it becomes clearer
how the opening octave of Keatss sonnet offers audiences a set of contrasting nar-
ratives, which depicted, and, in the case of Chapmans translation, countered the
imaginative and ideological superstructure10 that sustained Britains early colonial
ventures as well as its nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. Keats locates a second
sea-centered empire in the sestet of his sonnet, where he focuses on the European
trans-Atlantic empires that began in the sixteenth century with Spanish conquests in
the New World. Since the appearance of Tennysons note in Francis Palgraves The
Golden Treasury, literary critics have focused on Keatss mistake of identifying
Cortez instead of Balboa as the conquistador who discovered the Pacific.11 Charles
J. Rzepka has traced the extensive critical legacy of the Cortez/Balboa crux and
has suggested that we consider the Darien tableau as signaling the belatedness of
the poets own sublime ambitions.12 The Darien tableau represents the poems
final scene. Here, the poet/speaker identifies with some watcher of the skies an
astronomer or stout Cortez standing with eagle eyes and staring at the Pacific
[] with a wild surmise [] upon a Peak in Darien.13 This final prospect, like the
poem itself, intensifies the experience of temporal and spatial immediacy to a point
located geographically on the Isthmus of Panama. As with the opening octave, Keats
presents readers with a familiar imperial narrative that contains includes, accom-
modates, and restrains the seductive and terrifying acts of discovery and conquest.
The difference between Homers account and the violent history of conquest in the
New World is both a matter of genre and historical perspective. Difference is not
marked by contrasts choosing between Balboa and Cortez, for example but
rather it is measured in terms of variance and possibilities.
From this medial point, readers can gaze back across the fraught history of the
Atlantic corridor, a place where slavery and empire merged as they never had before.
Connecting the traditions of Europe to the New World, ancient history to the mod-
ern world, and linking two continents (North and South America), the Darien peak

10
I am referring to Louis Althussers discussion of ideology in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971).
11
Charles J. Rzepka, Cortez or Balboa, or Somebody Like That: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keatss
Chapmans Homer Sonnet, Keats-Shelley Journal, 51 (2002), 3575 (p. 38). As Rzepka reminds us, Tennysons
note in Francis Palgraves The Golden Treasury reads history requires here Balboa (A.T.), p. 38, fn. 2. This
emphasis on Keatss mistake has shaped readings of this poem and the poets biography. See The Golden
Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. by Francis Turner Palgrave (1861;
rpt. New York, 1932), p. 298.
12
Palgrave, p. 39. Rzepka follows Charles C. Walcutt in Keatss On First Looking into Chapmans Homer,
Explicator 5 (1946), 2; and C. V. Wicker in Cortez Not Balboa, College English 17 (1956), 38387, in
insisting that we no longer fixate on the question of whether or not Keats made a mistake in choosing Cortez
rather than Balboa. Essentially, Rzpeka argues that Keats made a choice to place Cortez rather than Balboa on
the peak in Darien, effectively indicating his own belatedness in arriving as a poet (following in the steps of
Chapman) just as Cortez discovered the Pacific after Balboa (Rzepka, p. 75). Rzepka follows the spirit of
Harold Blooms The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) in
identifying Keats as a poet anxious to establish his belated arrival as a significant poet.
13
KPP, ll. 914
132 DANA VAN KOOY

reduces in the sense of drawing disparate elements together and condensing them
rather than diminishing them (OED) a vast geo-history to a point, where audi-
ences can survey an expansive cultural history and compare imperial narratives.
From this vantage point, one can as many of Keatss contemporaries did imag-
ine Napoleon imprisoned on St. Helena in the South Atlantic.14 Britains former
colonies of North America appear to the North. The United States still haunted
some of Keatss readers who had advocated for the War of 1812 and still believed
the young country could be subjugated. For others like Leigh Hunt, the new coun-
trys independence offered proof that people can discover what is best for them.15
Looking far to the East, one sees Africa in the distance and a trail of tears to the
New World, particularly to the West Indies, where the violent legacies of conquest
persisted in the brutal practice of slavery. In the closing lines of the poem, however,
Keats encourages his readers to turn their gaze to the West. Displacing Balboa with
Cortez and much of Britains imperial history with the Spanish trans-Atlantic empire,
Keats directs his audience to look toward the Pacific, literally, towards peace. In the
aftermath of Napoleons defeat at Waterloo, peace, which had been deferred for
more than three decades, was now. As Keatss poem demonstrates, peace, like war,
did not constitute a single event, but rather, a condition of eventfulness.16 Keats
had already hailed the advent of peace after Napoleons first abdication in his son-
net, On Peace (1814), declaring let not my first wish fail, / Let the sweet mountain
nymph thy favorite be, / With Englands happiness proclaim Europas liberty. []
Give thy Kings law leave not uncurbed the great; / So with the honors past thoult
win thy happier fate.17 Keatss elision of the past and present as well as myth and
history in this encomium to peace reflects his realization that any future reform relies
upon reformulating a complex and violent cultural inheritance.

Young Poets and Cockney prospects

As poetic form and cultural paradigm, the eighteenth-century prospect poem evoked
place by denoting a particular geographical location and the speakers social or politi-
cal status. These images constituted longstanding aesthetic and literary conventions.
Aligned with a tradition of landscape paintings, dating from the seventeenth-century
works of Nicholas and Gaspard Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and includ-
ing subsequent English painters as well as the eighteenth-century aesthetic philoso-
phies of Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight,
the prospect poem offered readers a way of seeing and interpreting the geo-political

14
Leigh Hunt, Bonaparte in St Helena, No. 1, The Examiner, (16 June 1816), pp. 36970. Rpt. in SWLH, II, pp.
6971. In this article, Hunt makes clear how much people thought about Napoleon and also how European
leaders imitated his tyranny but not his innovation. What is perhaps most significant, however, about
Napoleons placement in the South Atlantic, is that his presence added to the terrifying legacies of the Spanish
conquistadors and the slave trade. And because of the history of his abdication and his return from Elba, there
was a real fear that he would somehow return and reignite the war.
15
Leigh Hunt, A Few English Reflections Before the Opening of Parliament, The Examiner, (21 January 1816),
pp. 334. Rpt in SWLH, II, p. 52.
16
Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
p. 4.
17
Keats, On Peace, KPP, p. 3, (ll. 714).
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 133

landscape. This visual panorama manipulated and distorted what was seen or imag-
ined to be seen just as the Claude glass curves, frames and colors the viewed object,
isolating it from the surrounding landscape to make it appear more like a painting.
The English prospect poem dates back to the publication of Sir John Denhams
Coopers Hill (1642), and can be traced through, among others, John Dyers Grongar
Hill (1726) and James Thomsons The Seasons (1730). While Samuel Johnson iden-
tified Coopers Hill as a form of local poetry, of which the fundamental subject
is some particular landscape [] with the addition of [] historical retrospection,
or incidental meditation,18 the specifics of place are often displaced by the genres
requirements to observe, speculate and imagine the possibilities available to the rov-
ing eye. As the following lines from William Cowpers The Task (1785) reveal, the
poets exultation in commanding such a view is reflected negatively in the boorish
drivers impatience with his animals and compromised by the poets revelation of the
real limitations of both sense and imagination, which he and the viewer must invari-
ably confront:
Now roves the eye;
And posted on this speculative height
Exults in its command. The sheep-fold here
Pours out its fleecy tenants oer the glebe.
There, from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps
The loaded wain.
The boorish driver leaning oer his team
Vocifrous, and impatient of delay.
Nor less attractive is the woodland scene
There lost behind a rising ground.19

There exists in this passage a flickering movement between here and there, empha-
sizing the constant movement of an eye that is keen to observe and comment but hardly
capable of lingering with deep-felt satisfaction. The speakers command appears too
histrionic at this critical moment: just years prior to the French Revolution. The sheep
may be fleecy tenants, but everything else seems heavy and unwieldy. Moreover, the
speaker is clearly anxious about what cannot be seen: what might be overlooked or
has been somehow lost. There exists hardly any possibility for satisfaction, retrospec-
tion or anticipation.
In contrast with Cowpers disquietude, John Barrell observes, there existed a
more idealized prospect in the early eighteenth century, when writers of various
political persuasions sought to negotiate [] a position from which they could
describe, or argue for, the unity of a society.20 Defined by his education and his
leisure, Dyers gentleman in Grongar Hill locates himself firmly in the natural
landscape where, presumably, he can rise above the politics of commerce and

18
Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets; and a Criticism of their Works, ed. By Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), I, p. 238.
19
William Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, 1785, The Poems of William Cowper, ed. by John D. Biard and
Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), II, Book I, p. 288305.
20
John Barrell, English Literature in History 173080: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martins Press,
1983), p. 40.
134 DANA VAN KOOY

war.21 The country estate represents a scaled-model of the nation, where nature and
natural law, not the court or commercial interests, hold sway. This archetypal gentle-
man identifies himself as a permanent social fixture. While undoubtedly an early
eighteenth-century ideal, it is clear that Henry Fielding in his 1749 The History of
Tom Jones, a Foundling takes issue with this characterization of the country gentle-
man. Just a quick glance at characters like Allworthy and Tom Jones reveal the
existence of more complex portraits that did not repress breaches in social decorum
or political corruption and revolutionary violence.22 Writers like Cowper capitalized
on this cultural instability and deployed the roving eye as a means of critique; oth-
ers, like Edmund Burke and Lockhart, appropriated the rhetoric of place and locality
and attempted to fix (rig and secure) their prospects and those of the nation through
adherence to tradition and patriotic values. With regard to Keatss Chapmans
Homer sonnet, Lockharts comments in Blackwoods, railing against the rootless
cosmopolitanism of the Cockney School, have proven quite influential in aligning our
reading with his own conservative perspective.23
The geo-physical and psychological terrain of eighteenth-century prospects under-
scores the importance of social privilege and cultivates a specific cultural sensibility
through the narrators authoritative subjectivity. The poet-painter-writer nonetheless
typically engages in multiple feats of legerdemain: momentarily unveiling his or her
considerable national investments particularly in terms of personal property and
wealth while masking the reality of unquestioned influence with a seemingly dis-
interested gaze. In some cases, this produces the illusion of an all-encompassing and
very exclusive omniscience; in other instances, it revealed the interiorized topography
of sensibility that was increasingly relevant in Samuel Richardsons epistolary novels
and developed much more fully by Jane Austen.
In Keatss Life of Allegory, Marjorie Levinson, in her discussion of I stood tiptoe
on a little hill, taps into this tradition to claim that Keats had neither the literary
capital nor any landed investments from which to view his world.24 In keeping with
Barrells ideas about eighteenth-century prospect poetry, Levinson identifies the tra-
ditional prospect poem as bestowing a wealth of knowledge and sensation upon the
reader: literally, to give him a view.25 Keats, Levinson contends, visibly registers his
estrangement and exclusion from ongoing cultural debates within by means of his

21
Traditionally, the perspective has been gendered as my use of pronouns in this paragraph suggests. Charlotte
Smith provides a later, but key exception to this rule. See Stuart Currans The I altered, Romanticism and
Feminism, ed. by Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185207; and Jacqueline
M. Labbe, Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, A Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford and
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 20410.
22
See John Allen Stevensons The Real History of Tom Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
23
In Situatedness, or Why We Keep Saying Where Were Coming From (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002),
pp. 2425, David Simpson discusses place and particularly how conservatives like Burke appropriated the rheto-
ric of place in the late eighteenth century. See also Lockharts first attack against the Cockney School in
Blackwoods Edinburgh Review Magazine (October 1817), pp. 3841. In Cortez or Balboa, or Somebody
Like that, Rzepka also notes that new historicists have endorsed the charges of befuddlement and poor educa-
tion that the poets antagonists at the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review leveled at him soon after his first
appearance in print (45).
24
Marjorie Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988),
pp. 23545.
25
Levinson, p. 240.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 135

voyeuristic display of a literary capital that he can only parody; she writes, he could
not have chosen a genre [the prospect poem] less suited to his station.26 Subsequent
scholarship has revealed more clearly that Keatss school education and the prosper-
ity of his immediate relatives were by no means as mercurial as Levinson claimed.27
Reading Levinson against the grain, Keatss improprieties in I stood tiptoe constitute
rhetoric of calculated waywardness28 and, I would add, his poetic prospects expose
the dominative, even exploitative character of the object world29 as well as a vision
for a better world. For too long, readers have collapsed Keatss worldly prospects
especially after Lockharts famous attacks in 1817 with the geo-historical prospects
in his poems.
The prospect poem was never a fixed form, even in the eighteenth century. However,
as Stuart Curran notes, Bowles radically transformed the prospect poem by fusing it
with the sonnet in his 1789 collection of Fourteen Sonnets, gradually expanded over
a period of fifteen years to nine editions.30 Bowles, Curran observes:
wed the sonnet of sensibility to the eighteenth-century prospect poem and on a broader
spectrum unwittingly created one of the paradigmatic modes of Romantic thought. []
[I]n placing the meditative mind in a natural scene that offsets its introverted solitude,
Bowles marked the boundaries in which his contemporaries, especially Wordsworth and
Coleridge, would formulate distinctive visions.31

While Coleridge initially praised Bowles for his ability to unite sentiment and moral
reflection, while adhering to a style of poetry so natural and real,32 the prospect
sonnets rhetorical structure proves more relevant to our understanding of how Keats
appropriated and employed this form.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge worked to re-establish the sonnet within the
British poetic tradition. With his Sonnets on Eminent Characters, published in the
Morning Chronicle (179495), Coleridge restored the sonnets Miltonic legacy of
public and polemical responsibility.33 Wordsworth firmly established the sonnet as
a Romantic form with his 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, where, Curran notes, in a
number of poems he adopts the mode of Bowless prospect sonnets.34 Throughout
his Miscellaneous Sonnets, Wordsworth breathes new life into Cowpers roving
eye: one moment plummeting the depths of sleep (nos. 57), in the next translating
Michelangelo (nos. 1012), and then turning, Breathless with adoration to a beau-
teous evening (no. 19), before questioning Where lies the Land to which yon Ship
must go? (no. 2). Reviewing these sonnets, we perceive more easily the lineaments

26
Levinson, p. 236.
27
For example, Nicholas Roes John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28
Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory, p. 241.
29
Levinson, p. 243.
30
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 32.
31
Curran, p. 32.
32
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions in
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, pp. 1317 (p. 17). By 1802, after meeting with Bowles a few
times, Coleridge confesses to Southey in a letter, he is not a Thinker (BL, I, 14, fn.2).
33
Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, p. 35.
34
Curran, p. 40.
136 DANA VAN KOOY

that structure Keatss Chapmans Homer sonnet: the search for a viable prospect; a
rejection of stasis; the trauma and the horror embedded in history; a sense of won-
der and discovery; the expansion of the imagination as it struggles to transcend its
cultural confines; and, finally, the invitation to think about or envision ourselves and
the world as we never have before.
Over the years Keatss Chapmans Homer sonnet has elicited some of the most
period-defining criticism by, among others, Carl Woodring, Jerome McGann,
Levinson, Daniel Watkins, Nicholas Roe, and Rzepka.35 Vincent Newey has sug-
gested that the poem achieves its status because it marks Keatss opening bid for
entry into the English literary canon.36 Keatss sonnet has also proved relevant to
multiple strands of literary and cultural theory. Still, what has defined the poem
most consistently is Lockharts vituperative censure, condemning Keats as some
upstart who knows Homer only from Chapman.37 Ironically, this has given
Lockhart an implacable authority that threads its way into almost every analysis
of the poem. This direct line between Keatss sonnet and Lockharts review often
fails to acknowledge that Keatss prospects were improving in 1816, when, as John
Kandl reminds us, Keatss public career as a poet begins with Hunts publication
of the Chapmans Homer sonnet.38 What Hunt arguably could not anticipate is
that his Young Poets article would initiate a very politicized cultural controversy,
with Keats, Hunt, and The Examiner at its center. Hunts placement of Keatss son-
net in The Examiner signaled its literary significance and introduced Keats as one
of an emerging fraternity39 of poets. Three poets Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
and John Hamilton Reynolds Hunt writes, promise a considerable addition of
strength to the new school.40
Today we tend to identify Hunts reference to a new school as the second-generation
poets who gathered around Hunt in the early nineteenth century. Lockhart, writing
as Z for Blackwoods, mockingly christened the Cockney School in the first install-
ment of his attack. This derisive tag has stuck and it has shaped our readings of Hunt
and Keats. However, it is important to remember that Hunts article appeared more
than a year before the Blackwoods attacks began. While it is tempting to classify
this essay as a Cockney School manifesto, avant la lettre,41 it represents one of sev-
eral attempts42 to identify romanticism with a new class of Poetry.43 Hunt follows

35
Carl Woodring, On Looking into Keatss Voyagers, originally published in 1965, rpt. in Critical Essays on
John Keats, ed. by Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), pp. 2836; Jerome McGann, Poetics of
Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Marjorie Levinson, Keatss Life of
Allegory; Daniel P. Watkins, Keatss Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1989); Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent and his edited collection, Keats
and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Charles J. Rzepka, Cortez or Balboa, or
Somebody Like That.
36
Vincent Newey, Keats, history, and the poets, in Keats and History, pp. 16593 (p. 183).
37
Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Geoffrey Matthews (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971), p. 103.
38
John Kandl, The politics of Keatss early poetry, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. by Susan
Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119 (p. 1).
39
Susan Wolfson uses this phrase in Keats enters history: autopsy, Adonais, and the fame of Keats, Keats and
History, pp. 1745 (p. 32).
40
KPP, p. 12.
41
See SWLH, II, p. 72 and KPP, p. 11, fn. 1.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 137

Wordsworths remarks in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in describing how this new
school:
began with something excessive, like most revolutions, but this gradually wore away; and
an evident aspiration after real nature and original fancy remained, which called to mind
the finer times of the English muse. In fact it is wrong to call it a new school, and still
more so to represent it as one of innovation, its [sic] only object being to restore the same
love of Nature, and of thinking instead of mere talking, which formerly rendered us real
poets, and not merely versifying wits, and bead-rollers of couplets.44

With his carefully framed reference to revolution tentatively linking poetry and
politics Hunt marks a historical break with eighteenth-century poetics while simul-
taneously insisting upon the continuity of a poetic tradition that remains tied to the
finer times of the English muse. Looking back to Wordsworth and his predecessors,
including Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, Hunt distinguishes real poets from
those versifying wits, and bead-rollers of couplets who have prevailed since the time
of Charles 2d.45 Hunt does not identify with the longstanding political and literary
traditions associated with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 or the neoclassicism
of Dryden and Pope.
His references to thinking and Nature point definitively to the Lyrical Ballads
(1789, 1800, 1802, 1805) and to the popular experimental poetry that marked the turn
of the century: Charlotte Smiths Elegiac Sonnets (1784), Cowpers The Task (1785),
Robert Burnss Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1788), Bowless Fourteen
Sonnets (1789), and Mary Robinsons Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate
Sonnets (1796). Hunt reiterates much of what Wordsworth and Coleridge aimed at
in their early poetry: not to imitate them so much as to align himself and his circle of
poets with a set of values and aesthetic practices. As Hunt recognizes in his reference
to thinking, and as Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter observe in their introduction,
there exists a shared collective interest in how readers make meaning,46 which is
reflected in Keatss sonnet and in the various poems and prefaces written by Romantic
poets, for example, Shelleys Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where he declares,
Didactic poetry is my abhorrence.47 While Hunt clearly admired Wordsworth, revis-
ing his Feast of Poets (1811 in Reflector; 1814) to identify him as the leading figure
of the contemporary literati,48 there also exists ample evidence of a widening breach
42
Wordsworths Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads and to his 1815 Poems are perhaps most well-known along with
Byrons English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). However as Jeffrey N. Cox notes in Poetry and Politics in
the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
several writers affiliated with Hunts circle wrote verse histories or criticisms of verse (103). Amongst these,
there are Hunts Feast of Poets, his Preface to Foliage; Keatss letters and his Sleep and Poetry; John Hamilton
Reynoldss Eden of the Imagination (1814); Horace and James Smiths Rejected Addresses (1812); Hazlitts
Lectures on English Poets (1818); Peacocks Four Ages of Poetry (1820); and Shelleys Defence of Poetry (1821).
43
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1789 and 1800, eds. Michael Gamer and
Dahlia Porter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), p. 172. Hereafter, LB.
44
KPP, pp. 1112.
45
KPP, p. 11.
46
LB, p. 22. In a footnote on page 22, Gamer and Porter note that the words think, thinking, and thought
occur 73 times in the 1798 edition and 140 times in the two volumes of the 1800 edition.
47
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New
York: WW Norton, 2002), p. 209. Hereafter, SPP.
138 DANA VAN KOOY

between the Lake School and the Cockneys in the aftermath of Wordsworths 1814
publication of The Excursion and his 1816 sonnets on Waterloo.49 Writing sonnets is
one way the Cockney poets claim their succession to an earlier Wordsworthian vision
that they believed the poet had abandoned in the post-Napoleonic era.

The Cockaigne landscape and Homers desmesnes

As a prospect sonnet, Keatss poem opens with the narrators attempts to locate
himself within the classical literary world of the Mediterranean:
MUCH have I traveld 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;
But of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-browd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet could I never judge what men could mean,
Till I heard CHAPMAN speak out loud and bold.50

Following Lockhart, critics still interpret these lines as evidence of the Keatss alien-
ation: he cannot garner any real cultural capital because he does have a command
of the classical languages and therefore must rely upon a translation. If these lines,
as Levinson notes, are merely a display of bad access and misappropriation,51 then
Keatss prospects are null and void, even before he steps before the public in 1816.
Although Levinsons double reading affirms Keatss rightful place in the canon while
effectively demoting him to a literary adventurer (with the commercial nuance of
that word) as opposed to the mythic explorer,52 it also invites us to question this
moment of critical hesitation when she focuses on the stillness and strangeness, and
wonder[s] where we have traveled.53
Approaching Keatss poem as a Romantic-period prospect sonnet and as the
deployment of an aesthetic technology that unveils a matrix of literary and historical
references to empire, it becomes clearer that the poems opening survey of the classi-
cal Mediterranean world is not just a reiteration of The Odyssey. The p oet-narrators
peregrinations mirror Odysseus voyage in the way that the narrators roving eye in
eighteenth-century prospect poetry reflects his/her attempts to make the landscape
meaningful. Keatss narrator, like Bowles, looks out on a latticed landscape and dem-
onstrates the difficulty of finding a locus of meaning and a viable prospect. Although

48
SWLH, II, p. 55.
49
For example, Francis Jeffrey famously condemned The Excursion with the words, This will never do in The
Edinburgh Review (November 1814), p. 1. Similarly, Mary Shelley, after reading The Excursion declared in her
journal, he is a slave (14 September, 1814, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. by Paul R. Feldman and Diana
Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), I, p. 25. Hunt criticizes Wordsworths sonnets
in Heaven Made a Party to Earthly Disputes Mr Wordsworths Sonnets on Waterloo, The Examiner,
(18 February 1816), pp. 9799; SWLH, II, pp. 5561.
50
KPP, pp. 1314.
51
Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory, p. 15
52
Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory, p. 12.
53
Levinson, Keatss Life of Allegory, p. 14.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 139

the terrain is not as obviously haunting as those depicted by Bowles, the references to
Gold, fealty, and States and Kingdoms point to the troubling, fractured elements
of an imperial landscape. In the manner of some eighteenth-century prospect poetry,
the roving eye is a satiric one, questioning the normative worldview while searching
for alternative means of reading it. Chapmans Homer, in contrast to Popes Homer
provides the narrator with a more amenable translation through which to view and
judge this sweeping panorama of ancient literary history. Meaning and purpose arrive
with the immediacy of sound travelling through the air: visually and cognitively, clar-
ity arrives with a turn of the line.
Versions of Keatss imperial landscape are commonplace in the pages of The
Examiner, where Hunt and William Hazlitt persistently question the legacies of empire
and the legitimacy of the government ministry and its lackeys.54 Shelley and Reynolds
also recreate and critique this imperial topography in their respective poems
Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude and The Naiad which Hunt also reviewed in
Young Poets. In each of these poems, there exists a solitary figure, reminiscent
of Wordsworths Solitary in The Excursion. Although the alienation that marks
Wordsworths character is not immediately recognizable, Shelleys references in his
Preface and throughout his poem to The Excursion mark these poems as part of a
collective response to Wordsworths poem. All three poems feature characters search-
ing for an alternative reality. Each desires something ineffable; they seek solace in
nature, in history and in the literary landscapes of epic and romance, but each step
they take leads them further afield. When Nature fails to provide Alastor with either
consolation or a viable prospect, he turns towards the brazen mystery [] of the
birth of time,55 history. As the character moves directionally eastward and further
back in time, following the example of the seeker in C.F. Volneys Ruins of Empire, it
becomes increasingly clear to the reader that these poems critique those alienated and
solitary figures who, like Popes Odysseus and Wordsworths narrators in his sonnets
on Waterloo, reiterate the contemporary fantasy of European power.56
Shelleys Alastor and Reynoldss Lord Hubert embark on quests that entrap each
character in a familiar literary landscape: respectively, the Orientalist fantasy and
medieval romance. The Naiad recounts the tale of Lord Hubert returning home with
his page to his bride, Angeline. As in Alastor and Keatss sonnet, the characters
impulse is to embrace the gold sun, the soft airs and the yellow leaves that define
the given literary landscape.57 While both characters want more than some rich fanci-
ful dream,58 they are also either explicitly or implicitly haunted by visions of

54
Like many of Hunts articles in The Examiner, William Hazlitts article printed in Hunts weekly, The Times
Newspaper, which is followed by a series of articles, including Illustrations of the Times Newspaper: On
Modern Apostates (15 December 1816), condemns the hypocrisy of the Tory Presss claims for Royal legiti-
macy. See also, John Kandl, The politics of Keatss early poetry, p. 4.
55
SPP, ll. 11628.
56
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 122. Leask also points out the similarities between the C.F. Volneys seeker and Alastor.
57
John Hamilton Reynolds, The Naiad: A Tale. With Other Poems (London, 1816), rpt. in The Eden of
Imagination, Safie, The Naiad, ed. by Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), ll. 13.
Hereafter, The Naiad.
58
The Naiad, l. 127.
140 DANA VAN KOOY

unrest and dark and rude disorder.59 These landscapes in Shelleys and Reynoldss
poems are phantasmal scene[s] that offer only pale despair and cold tranquility.60
In the opening octave of Keatss sonnet, the speaker describes a vast landscape,
but then discerns a new possibility, basically, a means of escape from this unidi-
rectional epic narrative. While Shelleys and Reynoldss characters are entrapped
by nature, imperial history, Oriental romance and feudal quest romance, Keatss
narrator/poet discovers an alternative prospect after looking into Chapmans

Homer. Clarkes Recollections provides a key to understanding the significance of

this reference. In his account, Clarke recalls several scenes upon which he and Keats
focused their reading: Senator Antenors portrait of Ulysses in the third book of The
Iliad, the description of Diomeds helmet and shield in the opening lines of the third
book, the description of Neptunes passage to the Argive ships in the thirteenth
book, and the shipwreck of Ulysses in the fifth book of The Odyssey. Citing three
of these passages, Clarke describes how the following passage from The Odyssey
riveted Keatss attention and how he had the reward of one of [Keatss] delighted
stares61 after reading these lines:
Then forth he came, his both knees faltring, 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 soakd his heart through; all his veins
His toils rackd ta labouring womans pains.
Dead-weary was he.62

At this juncture in The Odyssey Ulysses is shipwrecked; exhausted and broken,

he makes his way into an estuary where he cries out to the river god for mercy.
Dead-weary, and on the verge of dying, Ulysses discovers or makes, depending
on the translation, a leaf-bed and collapses into its warmth and safety. He has
been harried by Poseidon and guided, surreptitiously, by Athena; in Chapmans
translation (above), the sea permeates his body, soaking his heart through. In
contrast, Pope translates the line as His swoln heart heavd; his bloated body
swelld.63 Pope keeps his audience focused on his hero, restraining Odysseus suf-
fering within his expanding body and within the couplet, From mouth and nose
the briny torrent ran, / And lost in lassitude lay all the man [!!!].64 Chapmans
translation, however, redirects the readers attention towards the characters expe-
rience of almost drowning that makes the reader and, presumably, Ulysses
aware of anothers suffering: His toils rackd ta labouring womans pains.
Chapmans Ulysses has worked and toiled to survive and, like a woman in labor,
has experienced extreme pain and duress. Popes Ulysses expels the briny torrent

59
The Naiad, l. 176, l. 183.
60
SPP, Alastor, l. 697, l. 709.
61
Clarke, Recollections of Writers, p. 130.
62
Clarke, p. 130, emphasis in text.
63
Homers Odyssey Translated by Alexander Pope to which are added The Battle of the Frogs and Mice by
Parnell and the Hymns by Chapman and Others, ed. by Rev. J. S. Watson (London: G. Bell, 1906), V, 583.
64
Clarke quotes this passage in his Recollections of Writers, p. 130, emphasis in text.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 141

of the sea in a visceral act of self-preservation. In contrast, Chapman depicts

Ulysses body as more porous and more vulnerable; the sea permeates it and the
audience is encouraged to be as empathetic as the poet. Chapmans text disinters
Ulysses body from Homers poem, potentially enabling the audience to perceive
Ulysses as a common man rather than as Popes heroic figure. Chapman liberates
his hero from the iconic formulations of aristocratic and sovereign power that
Pope institutionalizes in his translation. Heroism need not be confined to couplets
or to images of a sovereign self. Translation, too, is not merely a prescriptive exer-
cise of repeating social and political commonplaces, but rather a creative attempt
to penetrate the venerable and illustrious garb worn by characters from whom
the reader is separated by time, geography, and language.65
Keats, like Shelley, Reynolds, and others in Hunts circle, is examining the role
played by poets and translators in countering the compelling literary traditions that
shape and define culture and its historical narratives. What interests Keats is how
Chapman a poet, a dramatist, and a translator, who along with Ben Jonson and
John Marston was imprisoned for his satirical reflections on the Scots when their
comedy, Eastward Ho appeared in 1605 (DNB) circumvents the iconic status of
heroic figures and produces a translation that delineates these familiar characters
as more human. Keatss reading of Chapmans less prescriptive translation likewise
points to an alternative, less imperial interpretation of classical characters, texts and
literary motifs. Chapmans verse as opposed to Popes neoclassical verse thus
held a particular appeal for Keats and his contemporaries, many of whom like
Wordsworth were keen to read the real language of men in a state of vivid
sensation.66
After comprehending what Chapman accomplishes through his translation, the
narrators prospect shifts dramatically, and, in the turn of a line, the poet and
his readers are transported to a place at the edge of infinite space. Transforming
into some watcher of the skies on the verge of a great astronomical discovery,
the reader stands with the narrator on the brink of yet another revelation. These
lines recall William Herchels discovery of Uranus in March of 1781.67 Cosmic
space, Keats had learned at Enfield academy, is a complex system of planets
and stars, and, as John Ryland insisted in his Contemplations on the Beauties
of Creation, the human imagination is almost divine in its ability to recollect a
thousand years of empires, perceive the future, or even tour the infinity of space.68
Just as Herschels telescopic observations of space revolutionized our knowledge
of the solar system, so, too, our understanding of Homer and his heroic figures
are altered by Chapmans translation.

65
The phrase venerable and illustrious garb is taken from William Godwins discussion of translation in Lives
of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton. Including Various Particulars of the Literary and
Political History of Their Times (1815). Nicholas Roe in John Keats and the Culture of Dissent discusses the
role of translation in Keatss education and amongst those in his circle in the first two chapters of his book.
Jeffrey N. Cox in Poetry and Politics refers to Godwins account of translation to situate Keatss interest in
Chapmans Homer on pp. 9192.
66
Wordsworth, LB, p. 171.
67
Nicholas Roe, John Keats, p. 35.
68
Roe, p. 43.
142 DANA VAN KOOY

Atlantic configurations and the Pacific turn

In October of 1816, when Keats composed his sonnet, it may have seemed that with
Napoleon defeated at Waterloo and now safely exiled on St. Helena, the time was
ripe to turn from the violent legacies of the Atlantic, and, like Balboa, gaze upon the
Pacific and its oceanic prospect of peace. Mirroring Europes first encounters with
the New World, this moment is replete with promise and hope, particularly for those
like Keats whose future prospects were, for the time being, promising. However, it
was not easy to shift the publics gaze toward the Pacific: away from the Atlantics
violent history and the human propensity to acquire the marvelous possessions of
others.69 Imagining Bonapartes imprisonment, debating the terrors of slavery, con-
templating a resumption of war with America or reading accounts of revolutionary
turmoil in South America, Britains preoccupations were Atlantic-focused.70 To re-
direct his readers attention away from an Atlantic perspective, which was physically
and culturally tied to the ancient world of the Mediterranean and foregrounded war
rather than peace, Keats creates a dialogic situation in his sonnet by juxtaposing the
ghosts of Homer, Odysseus, Herschel, Balboa, and Cortez. To adopt the language of
Derridas Specters of Marx, Keats not only speaks figuratively of these ghosts, but to
them, and with them.71
Moving from Homer and the classical empires of the Mediterranean, Keatss
narrator contemplates the infinity of Herschels universe through telescopes that
were progressively providing more details about a universe that appeared more
expansive with every technical innovation. Such juxtapositions contrasting reg-
isters of perception, particularly, spatial coincidence and temporal distance72
propel the sonnets narrator from one vista to the next, until in the poems final
lines disclose a further revelation. Here, instead identifying with Homer and his
Mediterranean travels or Herchels deep-space explorations, the narrator likens
himself to Cortez, but, significantly, aligns his and Cortez gaze with that of
another conquistador, Balboa:
Or like stout CORTEZ, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (ll. 1214)

69
Here I am referring to Steven Greenblatts Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992) and the disturbing conjunction of wonder and awe amongst those first
Europeans who desired to possess this new land, even at the cost of destroying all that they admired.
70
Hunt publishes his essay, Bonaparte in St Helena No. 1 in The Examiner, (16 June 1816), pp. 36970, rpt. in
SWLH, II, pp. 6971. See also Hunts essay, Revolution in the Brazils, and Conquest of Chili in The Examiner,
(1 June 1817), pp. 378 (SWLH, II, pp. 11014) and his follow-up essay printed in the issue of 3August 1817,
pp. 48384.
71
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, Routledge, 1994). I have adapted this idea of speaking to ghosts from Derrida,
but we see this acted out in the literature of the period, specifically, in Byrons Sardanapalus and Percy Bysshe
Shelleys Hellas, where in both dramas imperial leaders Sardanapalus and Mahmud must speak with the
ghosts of their ancestors in order to come to terms with contemporary revolutionary and reactionary events.
72
Rzepka uses these terms temporal distance and spatial coincidence in his discussion of belatedness in
Cortez or Balboa, or Somebody Like That, p. 44.
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 143

As Rzepka observes, interpreting these lines turns on the Cortez/Balboa crux, which
critics have assiduously interpreted as Keatss error. Rather than a point of error,
however, I would argue that the Darien prospect represents the pivotal prospect from
which the reader and the narrator can view the haunting legacies of empire and envi-
sion an alternative, peaceful future that can as yet only be imagined.
One explanation for Keatss focus on the Atlantic and its violent legacies can be
found in The Examiner, where Hunt surveys the political landscape in January 1816.
Hunt encourages his readers to recollect America and the earlier revolutionary eras
as evidence that people can learn what is for their real good.73 If history is cyclical
and humanity is condemned to repeat its errors, Hunt contends, the Heirs of the
STUARTS [] would now be on the throne of this kingdom; nay, setting aside the
assistance of those gentlemen, the Americans would now be a taxed people with-
out representatives.74 Throughout this series of articles,75 Hunt rails against those
wretched hirelings, who protect the rich and powerful while the poor, fretted and
worried into violence by the Corruptionists, [] are told to believe that Reform is
a bad thing, and that those who talk against the abuses of Constitutions, against
Seat-selling, Bribery, Perjury, and enormous Sinecures, are exciters to revolution and
bloodshed.76 Like Anna Laetitia Barbauld in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812),
Hunt looks westward, across the Atlantic to the Americas for the historical prec-
edents with which to confront the oppressive spirit77 that he feared was once again
impeding a progressive historical narrative. Hunts remarks offer his readers a com-
prehensive view of current events, situating them historically and geographically. His
essays testify to the sharp political, historical, and cultural focus on the Atlantic rim
when Keats wrote his sonnet.
Keatss Chapmans Homer sonnet mirrors the critical cognitive turn we see in
Hunts articles. However, instead of offering his audience an idealized counterpoint,
as Hunt does with the example of the America Revolution, Keatss sonnet capital-
izes on the imaginative possibilities inherent to Mitchells idea of the dreamwork
of imperialism. Like Hunt, Shelley, and Reynolds, Keats re-examines the cultural
narratives of conquest, discovery, and empire. Keats invokes twinned specters of the
Spanish Conquest, and, as Rzepka contends, collapses Cortezs and Balboas separate
encounters with the Pacific into a spatially identical but diachronically laminated
point of exalted awareness.78 This prospect produces an alternative vision. Instead
of idealizing or condemning the individual actions of one man as in conventional
heroic narratives identified with Pope, neoclassicism, Napoleon, Wellington, or trag-
edy, romance, and epic Keats places the most notorious conquistador, Cortez with
his men on the Peak of Darien. Keats is not interested in recreating history accurately,
but rather, with this final image, he encourages his readers to envision a Cortez who
could have imagined a different possibility than conquest. Reading and discussing

73
SWLH, II, p. 52.
74
SWLH, II, p. 52.
75
See Hunts articles, London, March 12 (SWLH, II, pp. 2931) and Disturbances in the Metropolis (SWLH,
II, pp.7679).
76
SWLH, II, p. 77.
77
SWLH, II, 52, my emphasis.
78
Rzepka, Cortez or Balboa, or Somebody Like That, p. 74.
144 DANA VAN KOOY

select passages from Chapmans Homer with his friend Clarke, Keats had realized the
significance of translation: how it frames characters and the narrative itself. Cortez
discovery of the Pacific in Keatss poem is, as Rzepka insists, belated, but it is still one
where Cortez and his men look toward the Pacific and not at the haunting legacies of
the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Instead of a solo heroic performance, this portrait
depicts a communal endeavor. It does not efface the historical record or encourage
people to forget the past; rather, it marks the poets (Keatss and his narrators)
investment in a future that can be reformed by people who dare to learn from history.

The Pacific turn

The Darien prospect represents a crossroads between North and South America and
between the Atlantic and the Pacific. As William Robertson describes this nodal point
of contesting forces in his History of America (1777), it is not above sixty miles in
breadth; but this neck of land, which binds together the continents of North and
South America, is strengthened by a chain of lofty mountains stretching through its
whole extent, which render it a barrier of solidity sufficient to resist the impulse of
two oceans.79 Robertsons chronicle of the New World emphasizes the importance
of geography and features detailed descriptions and panoramic views that offer the
reader an opportunity of discovering a prospect from which to view this history as
a succession of significant landmarks that shape and direct his narrative of historical
progress. In its account of the Spains conquest of the New World and in its descrip-
tion of the geological force needed to resist the impulse of two oceans,80 Robertsons
History emphasizes the momentous conflict and unremitting violence inherent to both
nature and history.
One can see the appeal of Robertsons account to Keats, whose life (17951821)
was dominated by war and conflict. In turning to Robertsons historical narra-
tive in the poems final lines, Keats follows a similar trajectory to Reynolds and
Shelley. But, in contrast to these poets who portray the means of ideological entrap-
ment, presumably for the purposes of revealing it, Keats desires to create a liberat-
ing historical perspective that will not entrap either his narrator or his audience.
Keatss sonnet portrays the allure of power and glory that inspired adventurers
from Balboa to Napoleon and acknowledges the gruesome violence they in turn
exerted against others. But Keats, like Hunt and others, also realized that 1816
constituted a moment when people had a choice: they could pursue the same course
of destructive conquest or they could seek a peaceful co-existence with others,
including the French and those in the New World who desired their freedom from
European dominance. Keatss On First Looking into Chapmans Homer provides
readers with an opportunity of looking into the mirror of human history and see-
ing both the monumental legacy of Western imperialism and Mitchells fractured
images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance. As a prospect
poem, Keatss sonnet rearranges the traditional vistas from which to view history
and empire. Appropriating the prospect poems roving eye, Keats restructures the

79
William Robertson, History of America, 2 vols (London, 1777), I, p. 201.
80
Robertson, p. 201
 DARIEN PROSPECTS IN ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMANS HOMER 145

relationship between historical and imaginative space, opening an alternative future

that embraces the possibility for peace.
Keatss sonnet thus reformulates the eighteenth-century prospect poem and renders
it a more modern literary form by creating a comparative interplay between multiple
historical and literary perspectives. Jeffrey N. Cox, writing in a different context,
suggests that these imaginative activities create a realizable-ideal ideal because it
is manifestly not the real of the audiences present, and realizable because it is being
enacted before us and thus appears as a human possibility.81 As such, Keatss poem
functions as a signaling space,82 where translation, transformation, and exchange
mediate colonial and imperial histories, giving readers the opportunity to re-imagine
and re-interpret the past while looking to an alternate, perhaps even peaceful future.
The Darien Prospects of my title therefore refer both to a Cockney poetics and a
Romantic period-defining aesthetics whereby writers mobilized the rhetoric and the
aesthetic technologies of place and locality to produce an alternative series of spatial
performances that interrogated the legacies of imperialism that had long captivated
the British reading public.

Notes on contributor
Dana Van Kooy is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at Michigan
Technological University, USA. She is the author of Shelleys Radical Stages:
Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Ashgate Press, forth-
coming), a study of how Percy Bysshe Shelleys dramas engage history, often recon-
figuring its tragedies for the purposes of political and cultural reform. She has also
published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and Literature Compass.
Correspondence to: Dana Van Kooy. Email: drvankoo@mtu.edu

81
Cox, Poetry and Politics, p. 144.
82
The phrase is Kate Flints, which she employs in Transatlantic Currents, American Literary History, 21 (2009),
32434 (pp. 32425).