Artistic License History: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
Jason taylor (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 144:
* [[John Keats]]'s ''On First Looking into [[Woolseyism|Chapman's]] [[Homer]]'' compares the experience to "stout Cortez" becoming the first European to see the Pacific. Actually, Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first guy to do this.
** Assuming that Marco Polo never looked left on his trip from Beijing to Hangchow. But there are also people who doubt that Marco ever set a foot into China, so...
***Depending on whether you count the East China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Indian Ocean as part of the Pacific, which may be the convention in the case of the first two but is not in the case of the second. Depending also on whether the convoy commodore preferred sticking to the shore where he could see landmarks or wanted to detour to port, risk the life of a princess, risk an important marriage alliance, risk himself dying of thirst and/or starvation and risk being [[You Have Failed Me...|tortured to death]] if he got back just to ensure that he saw the parts of the Pacific which were not in his mission orders to visit.
** According to my high school English teacher this was known enough in Keats's time so that it was probably a deliberate stylistic choice under [[Rule of Cool]]: would "stately Balboa" have sounded nearly as pretty in a poem?
** Or, it may have been a deliberate metaphor, in that Keats and Cortes were surveying a scene which was new to them but had already been viewed by others.
| |||