Keats for Beginners
IN A LETTER TO COVENTRY PATMORE, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS DESCRIBES John Keats as "one of the beginners of the Romantic movement," by which he means one of the poets who helped start the movement away from neoclassical poetry and poetics. (1) Given that Keats's first book of poems was published in 1817 when Wordsworth was in his mid 40s, calling Keats "one of the beginners" seems almost anachronistic. But Hopkins's letter evokes another sense of "beginner," one on which I will focus. An awareness of Keats as a beginner--one invested in the principle of beginning--lurks within Hopkins's letter. Of the poets one might associate with the Romantic movement--Wordsworth, Tighe, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Hemans--Keats is "one of the beginners," as if only some Romantic poets ought to be considered "beginners." Following Hopkins, or, at least, following this hint in Hopkins's letter, I want to ask: what does it mean to call Keats a beginner? Who or what is a beginner? What and when is a beginning? How might Keats's poems be understood as "for beginners"? These questions might take one in any number of directions, but as the philosopher Hannah Arendt, to whom we shall turn, suggests in the opening to The Human Condition, beginning and not ending, natality and not mortality, "may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought." (2) Beginning is, for Arendt, political because it is of, and not beyond, the world. Calling Keats "a beginner" makes possible a rethinking of Keats's relationship to politics. The event of beginning, I show with specific reference to the closing lines of "Sleep and Poetry" and the opening lines of Endymion, exposes a fundamental gap between cognition and perception, understanding and experience; for Keats, I argue, this gap makes possible political commitment even as it complicates the very idea of political action. "One of the Beginners" Almost from the start, Romantic poets have been accused of turning away from active involvement in politics, understood as instrumental action or intervention in the world of human affairs. The defining turn of the poet inward to explore his own thoughts and feelings, it is argued, constitutes simultaneously a turn away from the poet's own historical moment. Turning inward, the poet turns away from others. Keats for instance is most famous for addressing not his fellow man but a nightingale and an urn. Indeed, of the Romantic poets accused of turning away from history and politics, Keats is often a prime example. As Stopford A. Brooke writes in 1907: "[Keats] has ... no vital interest in the present, none in man as a whole, none in the political movement of human thought, none in the future of mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity." (3) Brooke offers a particularly damning picture of Keats but it is the picture of Keats largely still in play. It is the view of the poet, in other words, that we have largely inherited. Keats: the dreamer-poet far removed from (and even uninterested in) the world of human affairs. More damning than Brooke's argument that Keats has no interest in "the political movement of human thought" is Jerome McGann's later suggestion that Romantic poets use art as a means to escape the world. It is one thing to take no interest in politics; it is quite another thing actively to flee all things political. In response to a world turned topsy-turvy--with the French Revolution's dramatic failure, marked by the violence of the Terror and the rise of Napoleon as dictator--the Romantic poet, argues McGann, sticks his head in the sand (or, perhaps more precisely, in the idealized work of art). Romantic poetry, writes McGann, "is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities." (4) The poet uses poetry to transport himself into an idealized world and so away from actual human issues, and once again Keats is a prime example. …
Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde
Frankfurt school aesthetics has never quite fallen off the literary-cultural map; yet as with other areas of what currently goes by the name theory, interest in this body of work has known its surges and dormancies. For reasons too complex really to develop here (but which certainly involve, after two decades of critique, some changing Left views on aesthetics in and since the Enlightenment), we've recently seen widespread renewal of attention to the Frankfurt oeuvre and especially to the work of Theodor Adorno. The attention shows every sign of increasing in scope and influence and thus invites more sustained reconsideration of a theoretical
The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy
In this newly revised edition of his widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions that existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and he analyzes the ways of thinking and seeing that characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive approach, the author is concerned not only with the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment, and means of subsistence of this "cultural elite." He thus makes a major contribution both to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance and to our comprehension of the complex relations between culture and society. An excellent social history of the lives and culture of the artists and artisans which made it possible for the arts to flourish.