It’s possible to drive by the same house every day for years and not notice it. Then, suddenly, one day, you turn your head in just the right direction and see it for the first time, wondering how you ever missed it before.
Great works of literature are like that. In fact, one definition that fits great literature is “a work that can be read again and again, and each time you read it you get more out of it.” But sometimes re-reading isn’t enough. Sometimes, you need someone to metaphorically “turn your head,” so you can look in the right direction and catch a glimpse of something wonderful and new. That’s the role of a good teacher or good literary friends.
Reading Homer With New Eyes
In the case of the poet John Keats, that role was filled by George Chapman, a translator of Homer’s epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” Keats wrote a sonnet about the eye-opening experience of reading Chapman’s version of the familiar works for the first time. It’s called “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” and runs as follows:Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Until Keats read Chapman’s translation, Homer had never leapt to life with the flame of beauty and power he expected. Through this new lens, the familiar became unfamiliar and wondrous. He likened the experience to an astronomer spying a new planet for the first time or an explorer coming suddenly to the brink of a hill and seeing the immense, glittering blue sheet of the Pacific Ocean, stretching out before him like eternity itself.Keats’s poem highlights the fact that a great work of literature can be like a whole new world when it’s first encountered. Sometimes, it continues to astonish a second or third time when it’s viewed from a different perspective, like the perspective afforded by a different translation.
Recently, I had an experience similar to Keats’s. As a former high school literature teacher, I’ve read Homer’s works many times, researched them, thought deeply about them, and lectured extensively on them. I thought I knew what they had to offer. But I was wrong. Like an archaeologist digging up the ruins of Troy, I discovered that there’s always more to draw from these works.
Through the gentle guidance of our Senior Fellow and my classmates’ intense and heartfelt analyses, questions, and commentary, I saw new depths of riches within these works that had become so familiar. It was like looking into a patch of sunlit ocean and discovering that a ruined city lay flickering at the bottom.
By combining perspectives and observations of people united in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, we penetrated more deeply into the poems’ mystery than any of us could have done on our own. I noticed themes, structural symmetry, and passages of resplendent beauty that I'd missed in the past. A well-run seminar is like a work of art: it grants you a fresh perspective on something, so that you see it, as it were, for the first time.
The shared pursuit of wisdom through the cooperative effort of interpretation, the delight of shared discovery, the joy of shared emotion—all this is the fruit and proper result of what we might call “intellectual friendship.” I was privileged to enjoy this kind of intellectual friendship in the Institute’s class on the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” My classmates, teacher, and I used the poem to discuss deep, resonating questions about human life: What is war? What is peace? What is heroism? What things are worth dying for? What makes a home? What virtues are needed for a flourishing society? What do we make of our own mortality?
The common commitment to exploring questions like these and delighting in Homer’s probing of them—as well as the simple excitement of the plot and glory of Homer’s beautiful imagery—pushed the class interactions into something more than mere “classwork.” We were engaged in friendship. As Aristotle taught in “The Nicomachean Ethics,” friendship’s highest form is the shared pursuit of the good, the shared development of virtue, and the genuine concern for the welfare of the other.
I saw this at work in the class. We rejoiced together in the goodness of Homer’s work and in the mystery of being human. Remarkable, too, was the way that our reflections on Homer’s poetry reflected on ourselves; in sharing our reactions to the work, we revealed something of who we are, our own humanity, in often surprisingly personal ways. This discover of one another flows from the nature of intellectual friendship: the light of truth, beauty, and goodness has a way of diffusing over everything—including individual people. In our shared pursuit of these ideals, we get something equally wonderful as an unexpected bonus: one another.
