The energetic and tragic Keats
When John Keats wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he had just returned from a long evening at the home of a childhood friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. Charles Clarke was the son of the headmaster of Clarke’s Academy, where Keats had gone to school. A week earlier, Clarke had introduced Keats to one of his heroes, Leigh Hunt, editor of the independent Examiner (Hunt was imprisoned for two years for printing that the Prince Regent was “a fat Adonis at forty”), friend of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, and literary kingmaker. Hunt despised what he viewed as the overly ornate poetry of Alexander Pope, preferring instead Chaucer’s earthy Old English and the directness of Shakespeare and Milton.
