Homer and the Discovery of the Pacific: Gunn, Keats, Pope

Abstract

Thom Gunn’s ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’ (1970) describes a young couple who have driven across America and reached the Californian coast. Their exhilaration as they stare at the ocean recalls another moment of epiphany; when John Keats read George Chapman’s translation of Homer, he felt like a conquistador setting eyes on the Pacific for the first time. In this essay, I argue that Gunn’s poem engages closely with Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, and that Keats’s sonnet in turn draws on ancient ideas of Homer as being like the ocean. These are ideas Keats seems to have drawn from Alexander Pope’s translation of (and commentary on) the Homeric poems. Pope, Keats, and Gunn all regard the Homer poems as being in some way oceanic—both because of their vastness and capaciousness, and because they have been previously discovered by so many earlier readers.

Recent scholarship on classical literature and the eighteenth century

“…172–206; Power, 2015, pp. 93–9, 2018, 2021b; Ossa‐Richardson, 2019, pp. 239–83; Fitzgerald, 2022, pp.…”