Keats wasn't simply a fan of epic poetry—he wanted to be an epic poet. In the years before Keats composed his major odes, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn," the young poet tried his hand an epic verse, and completed several lengthy poems that would probably take most readers today more than one sitting to complete. Even if Keats' would-be epic, Hyperion, was abandoned, poems like "Endymion" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" testify to the influence that myth, legend, and the epic tradition bore upon his work. Keats approached his craft with ambition: with "On First Looking to Chapman's Homer" in mind, it's not much of a reach to suggest that stumbling upon Chapman's translations was a pivotal moment in the young poet's short-lived career.
For inspiration, Keats often looked to the past: the art, myth, and culture of Ancient Greece profoundly influenced Keats' poetic sensibilities. Images of the past recur throughout his work: "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for example, takes the scenes painted upon an ancient urn as its subject, while "Ode to a Nightingale" heavily alludes the mythological significance of the nightingale, drawing upon the tale of Philomena in Ovid's Metamorphoses. At the same time, John Milton and William Blake, Keats' English forbears, fed the young poet's epic aspirations. Milton's Paradise Lost and Blake's Milton testified to the classic form's contemporary endurance.
The funny thing is that Keats' shorter sonnets and odes, like "On First Looking to Chapman's Homer," "Bright Star," and "To Autumn," are his most celebrated, even though Keats set his sights on longer poetic works. "Endymion," Keats' book-length retelling of the Greek myth of the same name, was published in 1818 to scathing reviews, most of which objected to Keats' style and form. In spite of critical disdain for Keats' technical errors, the poem does contain its fair share of gorgeous lines, including its first few: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/ Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness..."
Knowing the trajectory of Keats' career, and knowing the poet's thoughts on his work from the many letters he sent to friends and family, it's also not out of the realm of possibility to suggest that the sublime wonder expressed in "On First Looking to Chapman's Homer" isn't simply a hyperbolic technique: it reflects the young poet's genuine reaction. As Chapman's voice breathed new life into a story so often told, the speaker no longer sees himself as a member of the hero's crew: he wants to be the man who steers the ship. Even though Keats never completed an epic poem, the breadth of life expressed in work, and its profound depth of emotion, mirrors his epic aspirations.
