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. …
John Keats and the culture of dissent
Introduction: John Keats in the Cockney School 1. A Cockney Classroom: Keats and the Culture of Dissent 2. Cosmopolitics: History, Classics, and Pretty Paganism 3. Keats and Charles Cowden Clarke 4. 'Soft humanity put on': The Poetry and Politics of Sociality 1798-1818 5. Songs from the Woods or, Outlaw Lyrics 6. The Pharmacopolitical Poet 7. 'Apollo's touch': The Pharmacy of Imagination 8. Lisping Sedition: Poems, Endymion, and the Poetics of Dissent Epilogue: John Keats's Commonwealth: The 1820 Collection and 'To Autumn' Appendix: Correspondence Relating to the 'Cockney School' Essays Bibliography Index
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.