Cowden Clarke.

From Spenser Keats learned how poetry might be gemmed, how it might glow with color.  But there was another source from which he was to learn what pure and severe beauty might mean.  This source was the poetry of Homer.  Keats knew nothing of Greek, yet all his poetry shows the influence of Greece.  At school he had loved the Greek myths and had read them in English.  Now among the books he read with his friend Cowden Clarke was a translation of Homer.  It was not Pope’s translation but an earlier one by Chapman.  The two friends began to read it one evening, and so keen was Keats’s delight that at times he shouted aloud in joy; the morning light put out their candles.  In the dawning of the day the young poet went home quivering with delight.  It was for him truly the dawning of a new day.  For him still another new world had opened, and his spirit exulted.  The voice of this great master poet awoke in him an answering voice, and before many hours had passed Cowden Clarke had in his hands Keats’s sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.  The lines that Spenser had called forth were a mere imitation; Homer called forth Keats’s first really great poem.

    “Much have I travell’d 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. 
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
    That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne: 
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He star’d at the Pacific—­and all his men
    Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—­
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

For some unexplained reason Keats broke his apprenticeship to the surgeon at Edmonton after four years.  He did not however give up the idea of becoming a doctor, and he went on with his studies at the London hospitals.  Keats was by this time about nineteen.  He was small—­only about five feet—­so that his fellow-students called him “little Keats.”  But his face was fine, and out of it looked eyes “like those of a wild gipsy-maid set in the face of a young god.”  He was a steady student, although he did “scribble doggerel rhymes” among his notes, and he passed his examinations well.  Yet the work was all against the grain.  More and more he began to feel that real nothing but poetry mattered, that for him it was the real business of life.  It was hard to study when even a sunbeam had power to set his thoughts astray.  “There came a sunbeam into the room,” once he said to a friend, “and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray, and I was off with them to Oberon and Fairyland.”

Keats gradually made several friends among the young writers of the day.  One of these printed a few of the young poet’s sonnets in his paper the Examiner, and in 1817 Keats published a volume of poems.  This was his good-by to medicine, for although very little notice was taken of the book and very few copies were sold, Keats henceforth took poetry for his life work.