Darien prospects in Keats's 'On first looking into chapman's Homer'

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Abstract

© The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association 2015. Since its initial publication in the pages of Leigh Hunt's The Examiner, John Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' has elicited period- and field-defining criticism. Hunt printed the poem as an example of a 'new school' of poetry. John Gibson Lockhart's famous response in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine framed its reception within a conservative personal attack that fixed the poem's geo-historical and aesthetic prospects to its young author (an easier target). In this essay, I examine Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet as a reformulation of the eighteenth-century prospect poem. Highlighting the poem's multiple prospects, its formal elements, as well as its deployment of aesthetic and cultural technologies, I identify Keats's sonnet 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 Chapman's Homer' offer readers multiple views from which to survey the imperial violence that structured Keats's 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.

Publication Title

Keats-Shelley Review

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