ABSTRACT
To Keats, books were life. What a poet made and how a man lived were all a part of the same adventure to worlds unconfined and beautiful. From 1611 to 1616, various editions and combinations of Chapman's translations of Homer had been printed. Many who have read neither Pope nor Chapman may wonder what there was to shout about in Chapman's version of Homer. Pope's translation was, of course, in the ten-syllable line of the heroic couplet, each two lines making a finished or closed segment. Part of Keats's excitement about Homer was tied up with a happy fusion of two other general imaginative experiences in literature: history and exploration, and Greek mythology. All the high adventure and desperate undertaking of the early voyagers, explorers, and discoverers must have appealed to Keats. Keats had suggested that the world of the imagination had its own geography to explore.
