On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer - References To The Poem

References To The Poem

• Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by Keats's writing about the discovery of Uranus when he wrote his early poem "Al Aaraaf" (1829).

• Vladimir Nabokov refers to the poem in his novel Pale Fire:

...and from the local Star

• Frances Power Cobbe analysed the poem in her essay "The Peak in Darien : the riddle of death" in The Peak in Darien with some other inquiries touching concerns of the soul and the body : an octave of essays, Boston. 1882.

• Myles na gCopaleen used Keats and Chapman as running characters in his Cruskeen Lawn columns in the Irish Times, usually living out shaggy dog stories leading up to increasingly elaborate puns.

• Freya Stark alludes to the poem in the title of "A Peak in Darien" (London, 1976).

• New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai has created a monumental artwork entitled “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” for the Venice Biennale 2011.

• Gilbert Adair wrote a long article entitled "On First Looking into Chaplin's Humour".

• Tobias Wolff references the last line of the sonnet (Silent, upon a peak in Darien) in "Bullet in the Brain."

• In the P.G. Wodehouse novel "The Inimitable Jeeves" Bertie Wooster states that his cousins "looked at each other, like those chappies in the poem, with a wild surmise."

• The first chapter of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons is titled "A Peak in Darien" and is headed with the last four lines of the sonnet. Titty gives the name "Darien" to the headland from which the Swallows first see the lake. The quotation crops up again in Peter Duck, prompting Bill to ask "Who's fat Cortez?"