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Genius
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
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15 Genius Genius has an appetite; it wants to eat the world. Keats knows a poet forms a world when a poet writes a poem. Later, he will know that world must come “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree [or] it had better not come at all.”10 But the earliest imprint of organic form confuses world and poem, confounds mouth and ear, entwines self and other. Such work seeks the genuine, and so explores genius: 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 bold11 Rumor is a gossipy wind. It pushes the sail in the mind toward an island charted on every map but sighted by none. Reading is an intrepid, leaky craft, seeking among the depthless wilds those “western islands” poets form. Journey breathes differently than arrival. Keats finds in Chapman ’s Homer, read out loud through the night with Clarke, an arrival at inspiration. The notion alters our assumptions about it. Inspiration is breath confused with appetite, breath grown substantial, and the source of that breath is another’s breathing. Homer’s breath is thevery wind of theworld that pushed Odysseus’s ship astray for its years of homeless wandering . To breathe in that world is to consume it, and by consuming, conserve it. Part of such conservation is Keats’s need to write a poem to mark the discovery; such work is ingenious. It must rec- 16 1816 ognize the other by conducting a work of its own, an act that makes hazy the distinction between sacrifice and gift. That haziness is genius’s own lovely obscurity. In the ancient sense, genius referred to that god which, at the very moment of our birth, protected our life.The cake we eat on our birthday has as its origins a bloodless sacrifice to the god of genius dwelling within us—the satisfaction of our own sweet tooth is happy accident to ancient obedience. When confused, we touch the center of our forehead, right there where genius is rumored to dwell, a little other in the very midst of self. To listen to genius is to let oneself be guided by that voice in the self that is not the self’s own. It implies an otherness exactly where we expect to find identity ; it speaks within us a rumor to us, that we are least ourselves where we are most ourselves. A guide that misdirects, genius orients us always back out of the self as sufficient confine, disables the ease of our self- sufficiency. Our genius locates our most essential self outside of the boundaries we normally claim by saying “I.” It is not so much our recognition of the impersonal, but the impersonal’s recognition of us.That difference, once established, is vast, is filled with “wild surmise,”12 for it undermines the hierarchy of self to genius, and makes one possessed instead of possessing.The self given over to genius is always more than and less than itself, never merely itself. Genius undermines lesser forms of completion by making the self both less than and more than itself, by altering one’s relation to oneself so that Heraclitus ’s fragment, “too much and never enough,”13 becomes curiously self-defining. Genius instills in the self that listens to it a form of desire that, the more its appetite is fed, only grows moredesirous. Such an appetite breathes in another’s poem (as here, Chapman’s Homer), reading as an act of consumption. The end isn’t satiety, but the need to create another poem. In this sense, one could talk of genius as a digestive activity —and indeed, genius oversees those functions the [44.220.59.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:38 GMT) 17 1816 conscious mind seeks no control over, lest in gaining it, we die: heartbeat, appetite, digestion, breath.When, in the next year, Keats writes to Reynolds, “I find that I cannot exist without poetry, without eternal poetry;”14 he is speaking of what he has discovered in the sonnets and other poems of 1816. He is not joking, nor is heeuphemizing. He has discovered he is hungry; he has discovered...