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. …
Disaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary American Poetry
Following the spate of devastating tornadoes that struck the United States in spring, 2011, the American poet, Mark Levine--also the author of F5 (2008), a book of journalistic non-fiction about the massive tornado outbreak of 1974--wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com that begins by quoting Keats. If the destruction visited by the tornadoes seems "a freakish demonstration of nature's power," Levine comments, "what might be more extraordinary [...] is our capacity to pretend that disaster--and the sudden upending of ordinary life that it brings forth--is not part of our very fabric, what poet John Keats might have called 'A partner in your sorrow's mysteries.'" (The quotation redirects the import of Keats's line from the "Ode on Melancholy," since in the context of the poem the line insists, by contrast, on the value of not taking any artificial partner in sorrow's mysteries: "Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl / A partner in your sorrow's mysteries," Keats writes, before turning in the next stanza to compare a melancholy "fit" to sudden weather [1. 6-8; 11]). What caught my attention here was not so much the general point Levine makes--though its capaciousness is "what we least want to recognize about our lives," our vulnerability to disaster might be the most basic thing we share--as the recruitment of "poet John Keats" as disaster's lyric signature. "Keats" functions in this instance as shorthand both for a collective vulnerability to disaster and for a consolatory form of melancholic feeling won from the proximity of disaster. When I came across Levine's piece, I had already been thinking about the way Keats and disaster are linked in his difficult, compelling poem "John Keats," placed close to the heart of his collection Enola Gay (2000). Like the collection as a whole, the poem depicts (as John Ashbery puts it in the jacket blurb) "a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world," where life hangs on haphazardly in the wake of some unspecified catastrophe but without--yet--either total annihilation or the surprise of something totally unexpected. This in-between time recalls Keats's description of his own "posthumous" existence, or the temporality of the Titans' grief in Hyperion (think of Thea's "listening fear [...] as if calamity had but begun" [I. 37-8]), or the knight at arm's sojourning on his "cold hill's side" in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1. 44). The poem opens with a logically challenging (or logically challenged) dexis, like the start of a story ("so there we were") and like a puzzling return ("weren't we already here?"), that sets the tone for the disorienting narration that follows: Here we were. Here here we were. Graphite and plaster and cardboard and canvas. A dozen human fingers of yellow rays. Mere fully exposed here fully protected. [...] The newly-dead were not lazier than we. (48) In the possibly post-nuclear, apparently war-ravaged scenario of agonized indolence the poem describes (despite the insistence of "here," the poem never really explains where "we were"), "our ideal vase / was still with us," still a friend to man, to whom it is reciting, sadly or hilariously, "treatment methods / we were eager to share" (48-9). (1) In a poem that is part homage, part elegy, part ironic riff, Levine uses the figure of Keats as the pivot between lyric and its present conditions of existence, its history, and what seems the compromised possibility of its future. The figure of Keats plays a special, even peculiar, role in the imaginary of contemporary American poetry in ways whose effects insist symptomatically across the range of poetry, sometimes in emphatic fashion, as in Levine's uses of Keats, and sometimes obliquely. The discussions in several excellent studies, including Jeffrey Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats (1998), Michael O'Neill's The Alt-Sustaining Air (2007), and James Najarian's Victorian Keats (2002), indicate the richness of the field. …
Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies
Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.