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. …
Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
"Posthumous Keats" is the result of twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romantic poets. John Keats' famous epitaph - 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water' - helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before his time. Keats, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-five, saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry and therein, Stanley Plumly argues, lies his tragedy: Keats thought he had failed in his mission 'to be among the English poets'.In this close narrative study, Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality - an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats. Incisive in its observations and beautifully written, "Posthumous Keats" is an ode to an unsuspecting young poet - a man who, against the odds of his culture and critics, managed to achieve the unthinkable: the elevation of the lyric poem to sublime and tragic status.
Bodies Politic : Disease , Death and Doctors in Britain , 1650-1900
In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced. Expansive, humorous, intelligent, and incisive, his broad range of historical works has excited and educated several generations of students of history over the past thirty years. His death leaves an unfillable void within the global history of medicine. At the same time, however, this book itself, completed well before his death, is haunted by elements of despair and uncertainty that should make us carefully reconsider not only the purpose and direction of our professional inquiries but also our own mortality.