“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and Keats’s poetic El Dorado

Abstract A thorough analysis of the sonnet’s unique maritime imagery, within the broader context of Keats’s early poems and the letters on the aesthetics and psychology of creative writing, along with the historical sources available to him at the time, as well as Burke’s concepts of “Sublime” and “Beautiful”, and recent cognitive psychological descriptions of the creative process (Sawyer, 2012; Kelley, 2013), reveals that the triad Balboa-Cortés-Peak in Darien is not the result of a historical mistake, nor a way to subconsciously express the young author’s sense of poetic belatedness (Rzepka, 2002) and will of appropriation and emulation of traditional literary models, such as Homer and Chapman (Frosch, 2004). The triad is a metaphorical vehicle imaginatively anticipating, with the prodigious semantic density allowed by the opacity of the poetic sign, Keats’s later theorisation of the tripartite poetic mind in “simple”, “complex” and “philosophic” (Letters, I: 183-187) and deliberately foreshadowing the decision to compose his first significant “test of Invention” (Letters, I: 170), Endymion, with an independent artistic voice: his newly discovered and still unchartered poetic ‘El Dorado’. Keywords: British Romanticism, John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, psychology of creativity and literature, maritime imagery in literature, history of navigation, Age of Discovery and exploration, Homer in Anglophone literature.