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. …
"Ever on the Watch": Wordsworth's Attention
And, attention now relaxed, A heart-felt chillness crept along my veins. --William Wordsworth, The Excursion 2.1.618-19 (1) That portion of every day of our existence which is occupied by us with a mind attentive and on the alert, I would call life in a transcendent sense. The rest is scarcely better than a state of vegetation. And yet not so either. The happiest and most valuable thoughts of the human mind will sometimes come when they are least sought for, and we least anticipated any such thing. --William Godwin, Thoughts on Man (2) IN HIS 1839 RECOLLECTION OF WORDSWORTH, THOMAS DE QUINCEY RE calls an evening during the Peninsular War when he and Wordsworth went for a walk to await the mail carrier whom they expected to arrive with the newspaper. According to De Quincey, the two writers used to walk every evening--in what he calls "the deadly impatience for earlier intelligence"--to meet the carrier of the London newspapers. On this particular evening when, according to De Quincey, "some great crisis in Spain was daily apprehended," the two waited for over an hour with particular impatience. "At intervals," De Quincey explains, "Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on the high road, applying his ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be groaning along at a distance." (3) Stretched out on the road, with his ear firmly pressed to the ground of Dunmail Raise--a peak in the Lake District and the mythic site of a battle from the year 945 where, according to legend, a slain king is buried--Wordsworth listens for the arrival of the Courier so he can read the daily news of the current war. (4) But that which Wordsworth, according to De Quincey's narrative, calls his "intense condition of vigilance," a phrase perhaps more likely to describe a posture in the current war itself than that of the quotidian wait for the post carrying news of it, is not only met with disappointment when the carrier does not arrive, but also encounters an effect that puts into question the very conditions and consequences of "vigilance" itself. For even though the gesture of stretching himself on the ground might seem the perfect caricature of attention, as though Wordsworth were acting out and literalizing the term's etymological link to the Latin words ad+tendere, meaning "to stretch towards," when Wordsworth reflects upon his act, he remarks neither on the distention of his body, nor on the application of his ear to the ground. (5) He is struck, rather, by what happens when he relaxes, when he interrupts, his attentive stretch. According to De Quincey, Wordsworth observes: I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if under any circumstance, the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment, any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now, my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the lake of Wythburn from the Keswick road; at the very instant ... when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances. (6) Wordsworth's emphasis here on slackening rather than contracting the organs of attention, this spontaneous and surprisingly productive gesture of no longer paying attention, signals an important contribution on the part of a poet to the discourses of attention at the time, redirecting the controversy in early psychology over whether attention is a voluntary act to ask, not unrelatedly, about the perception produced by a shift in, or withdrawal of, attention. …
Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism
Conflicts between formal or stylistic analysis and historical scholarship are a traditional problem in literary studies. In the field of hermeneutics, where the lines of disagreement tend to sharpen, the best commentators-Lionel Trilling, for example-have generally aimed for, and achieved, various pragmatic agreements. Few critics would take seriously any suggestion that Byron's poetry could be adequately interpreted without bringing a fair amount of historical and biographical information to bear.' On the other hand, a textonly approach has been so vigorously promoted during the last thirty-five years that most historical critics have been driven from the field, and have raised the flag of their surrender by yielding the title "critic" to the victor, and accepting the title "scholar" for themselves. This division of labor has produced a fundamentally unstable situation because it is based upon unresolved and, what is worse, unexamined tensions and conflicts. The problems appear, at first, in a purely practical form: for the student needs to know how he is to decide whether (or in what way) historical and biographical information is needed for interpretation. Confronted with a particular text, we cannot always tell at what points (if any) we ought to press for some particular "extrinsic" material or approach.2 Textual problems of these sorts are widespread, nor are they a function of a certain sort of poem (like a topical satire) or a certain type of writer (like, say, Byron). They exist because of general critical assumptions about "the mode of existence of a literary work of art."3 The introductory remarks in Paul deMan's well-known essay on