>
> Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2003 06:23:23 -0700
> From: Mary Krimmel <mary@krimmel.net>
> Subject: Re: NPPF Comm 3: C.90-121 notes (2)
>
> At 10:15 AM 9/4/03 -0400, you [Jasper Fidget] wrote:
>
> "...He [Kinbote] says parenthetically that the Keats' poem ['On Chapman's
> Homer'] is "often quoted in America." Was that the case in the 50s?  (It
> sure isn't now.)"
>
> Yes, if by "often" we mean "often relative to quoting other poetry".
>
> It was read in high school English class in the 30s, and apparently
> continued as exemplary at least until 1962, when Laurence Perrine included
> it in a textbook "Sound and Sense: An introduction to Poetry." The full
> title is "On first looking into Chapman's Homer". However, I have usually
> heard it called "On Chapman's Homer."
>
> Perrine gives this interesting note:
> "John Keats, at twenty-one, could not read Greek,...Then one day he and a
> friend found a vigorous translation ... [They] sat up late at night
> excitedly reading aloud to each other from Chapman's book. Toward morning
> Keats walked home and, before going to bed, wrote the above sonnet and sent
> it to his friend..."
>
> Students (at least in America) seemed to be fond of noticing Keats's
> historical mistake of attributing discovery of the Pacific to Cortez, when
> it was in fact Balboa who was the first European known to see the Pacific
> from its eastern shore.
>
> Mary Krimmel
>
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>