Keats, like most of his contemporaries, knew
Homer only
through the translations of
Alexander Pope. Much
Elizabethan
literature had not been reprinted, and was therefore hard to come by.
Cowden Clake, a friend and former tutor, had managed to borrow a 1616 folio of
George Chapman's
translation of Homer through
Leigh Hunt. Keats and Clarke pored
over the calf-skin folio until dawn, rereading favorite passages,
amazed at how Chapman's translation brought the stories to new life.
When Keats got home, he wrote this
sonnet, and then sent a copy by
messenger to Clarke, who found it on his table when he came down to
breakfast a few hours later.
Incidently, none of Keats' contemporaries noticed the historical error.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was the first to point out that it was
Balboa,
and not
Cortez, who was the first European to discover the
Pacific
Ocean.