Scarcity and Poetic Election in Two Sonnets of John Keats

Abstract

This traveling in the realms of gold refers to reading (think of the gilt edges of culturally privileged books), but it will also remind us of Homer's hero, Odysseus, whose travels were the very type of labor. The speaker of the sonnet is engaged in a struggle against his own ignorance and inexperience. The sonnet will oppose that ignorance to an abundant knowledge, and access to this knowledge will be a function, not of plodding labor, but of a strange kind of accident. By ethical I mean a certain set of choices the speaker makes as to how to manage his own mind, in an environment where meanings are not to be found everywhere-where it is possible to read and not understand (Yet did I never breathe its pure serene). These choices are of the right models (Shakespeare, Chapman, Homer) and the right mode of attention-not the (exotic but tedious) activity of the first lines, but the awesome passivity of the last. By accident I mean that the new expansion or opening seems a free gift from the world to the poet, and does not seem to depend directly on the labor of wandering struggle, but on being in the right place at the moment when the truth chooses to emerge (Chapman speaks, the new planet swims, the Pacific appears). Keats is implicitly exploring the issue of poetic vocation in this sonnet. His exploration is governed by these two economies, the initial laboring and the new discovery or opening-out. Poetic vocation has to be discussed in terms of these economies because it takes its place within a formation of what Sartre called scarcity.2 Not everyone can be a poet, and not every poet can be a successful one-furthermore, when a person