“Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That”: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats's “Chapman's Homer” Sonnet

Keats’s mentor Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to Homer in the robust translation of the Elizabethan poet George Chapman. They read through the night, and Keats walked home at dawn. This sonnet reached Clarke by the ten o’clock mail that same morning. It was Balboa, not Cortez, who caught his first sight of the Pacific from the heights of Darien, in Panama, but none of Keats’s contemporaries noticed the error.