Keats for beginners.

McGrath, Brian

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. (5) Only in very recent years have we begun to think again (and differently) about Keats and politics. (6)

We have not tended to think about Keats and beginnings, even though he is, to quote Hopkins again, "one of the beginners," in part because we have tended to focus on Keats's intense preoccupation with endings, on what Keats himself in a letter to Charles Brown calls his "posthumous existence." (7) Even before Keats knew he was going to die of tuberculosis, he was preoccupied by mortality and tended to think together mortality and poetic production: as Moneta explains in The Fall of Hyperion, to feel "What 'tis to die and live again before / Thy fated hour" is, at least in part, what makes one a poet. (8) The poet is haunted by a future death that, in some sense, has already occurred. It has been "felt." "Crucial to the figuration of Keats as Poet," explains Andrew Bennett, "is an early death which is presciently inscribed within the poet's life and work--an early death which he knows about." (9) Keats enters history a poet only ever barely of this world, a poet whose life had already ended. (10)

To think about Keats and beginnings (and beginnings and politics) is to depart from these two dominant threads of Keats criticism--the apolitical poet, and the poet preoccupied by his own end--and begin to focus on a Keats who writes for beginners and of beginnings, a poet who attempts through beginning (as concept and act) a rethinking of politics. From within the question of beginning Keats bears witness to a politics conceived around what we do not yet know about the world, about ourselves, and about our being in the world with others without foundation or guarantee. (11)

Keats's Beginnings

Discussions of Keats's beginnings often themselves begin with "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," as both Lawrence Lipking and Helen Vendler do in their attempts to identify the moment a young, fledgling poet became the mature poet now anthologized. (12) How did Keats become Keats? This question is of great importance, at least for Lipking, because "Keats seems to hold the key to everything we would like to know about how one becomes a poet" (4). The key to how one becomes a poet is found in Keats and in particular in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Just as Keats looks into Chapman's Homer so too do readers of the poem look into Keats for the first time. One sees Keats's beginning.

But the decision of Lipking and Vendler (and others) to focus on this poem from 1816 confirms much of what one knows about beginnings, those startling and unexpected events that take one most by surprise and that change everything moving forward. If Keats discovers "Keats" in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," then this is not in any simple way true for Keats himself, who is plagued by doubts about his own poetic powers. Numerous examples of such self-doubt are found in his letters even after "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," the poem that marks Keats's emergence, his beginning, as "Keats." (13) As he writes to Haydon in May of 1817 about the first lines of Endymion (begun toward the end of April): "truth is I have been in such a state of Mind as to read over my Lines and hate them" (Letters, 12). What Keats bears witness to in beginning, from within beginning itself, may be distinguished from what others discover there. Lipking and Vendler see a beginning. Keats sees only more of the same.

In an influential essay, Vendler attempts to locate what she calls the experiential beginnings of Keats's odes. (14) With reference to "To Autumn," for instance, and following a letter from Keats to Reynolds from September of 1819, Vendler argues that the experiential beginning of the poem is found twenty-six lines in, with the stubble-plains. As Keats writes in the letter to Reynolds: "How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble-plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it" (Letters, 291-92). "To Autumn" becomes a different poem, argues Vendler, once it is understood to emanate from the stubble-plains instead of working leisurely toward them. She acknowledges that her reconstruction of the experiential beginnings of Keats's odes may be conjecture, but revealing the hidden beginnings "can help define the shape and course of each ode as it completes itself to wholeness." (15) A sense of the whole poem is possible, argues Vendler, only if one identifies its origin, only if one, in other words, distinguishes the poem's literal from its experiential beginning.

What one learns from attending to Keats's "hidden beginnings," following Vendler's argument, is that Keats is unlikely to begin a poem with the experience that occasioned it. For Vendler, these experiential beginnings are hidden but may be revealed through critical intervention. But another question is raised: why should the experiential beginnings of the poems time and again be moved to the middle or end of the poems? Why should Keats postpone the poem's beginning? In identifying a split between a poem's literal and experiential beginning, Vendler highlights the ways Keats's poems allegorize the difficulty of knowing a beginning. As a result of moving the "beginning" to the middle or end of the poem, "a beginning," for Keats, is no longer purely phenomenal.

And indeed, Keats, in the same letter to Haydon quoted above, troubles the very idea that a beginning is an event available to consciousness and understanding. "I read and write about eight hours a day," writes Keats about his preparation for composing Endymion. He continues: "There is an old saying well begun is half done'--'t is a bad one. I would use instead--Not begun at all 'till half done' so according to that I have not begun my Poem and consequently (a priori) can say nothing about it" (Letters, 12). Keats somewhat playfully reverses the familiar saying, suggesting instead that one has not begun until one is "half done." But how does one know when one is half done if one has not yet begun? For Keats, it seems, a beginning does not happen at the beginning (or first) but only after the poem is well underway; a poem begins only after reaching its midpoint, as if one all of a sudden discovers that one has begun a poem only at the point at which one also discovers that one is half done with it. "Oh, I didn't even know I'd begun!" One can "say something about" a beginning only later, and in this way one is always attempting to catch up to a beginning that has escaped one's attention, one's understanding. (16)

Beginnings are not simply "hidden" but often missed, and as a result, it seems, readers repeat the difficulty of beginning. When is a beginning? How does one know one has begun? These are questions raised by Keats's poems and letters. Readers of Keats register the force of these questions but often in surprising ways. Vendler's essay, for instance, announces its own beginning more than once. "Let me begin with the one factual instance," writes Vendler after an introductory paragraph. Straining against some invisible force that labors to prevent a beginning ("let me begin"), even after the essay has already, in another sense, begun, the next paragraph announces a second (or third) beginning, "I will begin with the other ode." (17) Even as Vendler attempts to locate the experiential beginnings of Keats's poems, her own writing registers the impact of beginning--or not. The beginning of her own essay, in other words, is, like Keats's odes, divided, dispersed, and deferred. Vendler's essay reproduces Keats's difficulty locating beginnings and so bears witness to the surprise of beginning.

The character of surprise is inherent in all beginning. To the extent to which they happen, beginnings, like traumatic events, happen belatedly (for us, to us). That is, precisely because a beginning takes one by surprise it is not an event for which one is prepared. A beginning happens too soon (before one is prepared for it) and as a result it happens also too late (it is missed, understood only after the fact). One only has a chance to understand the event later. And for this reason, one does not know a beginning as a beginning as it happens. Such is the awkward temporality that beginnings mark and that Keats explores.

A Resolution to Begin

If not all then most poets struggle with beginning in that more common sense: how to begin to write a poem? But not all poets thematize beginning itself in quite so enigmatic a way. Keats's thematization of beginning, though, may be, to return to Hopkins, what helps make Keats "one of the beginners" of the Romantic Movement. I would like to turn now to a specific passage from one of Keats's early poems, "Sleep and Poetry." Here, as in the letter to Haydon, Keats struggles with and so explores the enigmatic temporality of beginning.

In "Sleep and Poetry," the final poem from his first book, Keats attempts to work through various anxieties about his future as a poet. The poem stands, in other words, as the summation of his previous attempts at making a beginning. He bounces between multiple and sometimes conflicting fears: what if I do not have enough time before I die to write the best I have to write; what if some "say that I presumptuously / Have spoken" (270-71); what if the reception of my poems is negative and hastens my disgrace? After asking for "ten years, that [he] may overwhelm / [Him]self in poetry" (96-97), Keats resolves in conclusion to make a beginning, and in part "Sleep and Poetry," like Endymion, lays out the necessary conditions for his future career as he resolves to begin even though he does not yet feel confident enough to begin. He finds relief from the questions listed above in the thought of the poet's house, where cold and sacred busts smile. Posterity will disclose all. There is no need to worry now: "happy he who trusts / To clear futurity his darling fame" (358-59). Keats convinces himself and in a sense this is the aim of the poem, to convince himself that worrying about whether or not he is prepared to write the poems he longs to write, poems that will have the desired effect on his reading audience and so guarantee his place in the poet's house, will only prevent him from beginning.

But in concluding the poem, Keats tells a strange story of the poem's beginning. At the end of the poem, Keats resolves to begin the poem that announces his beginnings as a poet. The final lines of the poem read:

      There came
   Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
   Within my breast; so that the morning light
   Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
   And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,
   Resolving to begin that very day
   These lines; and howsoever they be done,
   I leave them as a father does his son.
   (397-404)

The poem's final lines introduce a number of textual complexities. The poet awakens from a sleepless night but feels refreshed nonetheless. And he resolves that very day to begin "these lines," "Sleep and Poetry." With the semi-colon in the next to last line, though, there is a jump from the description of the past when the poet rose refreshed and resolved to begin and the present moment in which he reflects on the poem he has, quite suddenly, concluded. Now reflecting on what he has written, the poet is unsure how well these lines have been composed; he wonders whether they successfully constitute a poem. But howsoever they be done, he must leave them to their future audience. The final determination on the quality of the poem is not for Keats to decide. Only posterity will tell whether or not he has a place among the poets in the poet's house. To worry too much about how well the poem will do would prevent the poet from leaving the poem to others, to a future he cannot know. Following poetic convention, the poet must leave the lines as a parent must leave a child to a future beyond his or her control. This reading of the final lines follows from the anxieties expressed earlier in the poem.

And yet the lines might be read differently, as indicating the poet's ignorance of how the lines came to be "done" (in other words, how they came to be begun in the first place). The poem moves very quickly, almost immediately, from the poet's resolution to begin writing to the writing of the lines having been concluded. The lines, in other words, might be taken as a sign of the poet's lack of confidence ("I do not know how good a poem this is"); but they also suggest that the poet does not know how the lines came to be composed in the first place: "howsoever these lines came into existence, howsoever they be done, I leave them now." The line acknowledges--in however subtle a way--the absence of the poet during the actual composition of the poem. The line does not just communicate the poet's worry that the poem is unworthy of publication, and he is not simply worried that the poem will be deemed unsuccessful. The final lines also disclose the poet's absence during the composition of the very lines that were begun and now stand concluded, ready to be left to others. The poet resolved to begin but the lines following the semi-colon suggest that the poet may have been absent to what in fact was begun. He encounters them now "done," howsoever they came to be done.

Faced with this strange unawareness of the poem's beginning, the poet claims the lines he finds before him as his own. Howsoever these lines came to be present on the page, the poet leaves them as a father does a son. Here, the paternal/filial kinship between the poet and his lines results from the positing power of language. Paternity, for instance, is never determined empirically with absolute surety. It is performed and enacted in the absence of any guarantee of biological relationship. A father, like the poet, must posit the existence of a relationship that is not simply or entirely natural because it is also linguistic. (18) Howsoever these lines came to be, the poet claims them as his son and leaves them as a father. On the one hand, the poet resolves to begin and concludes the poem with the same anxiety expressed earlier: what if these lines are not great poetry? I must now leave them. The conclusion to the poem attempts to secure the poet from this worry that the lines are unworthy of publication. On the other hand, the lines might be read, as I have been suggesting, as disclosing a strange unawareness on the part of the poet as to how exactly the lines came to be written, foregrounding once again and with some intensity the ways in which one may always be ignorant of what, of all that, is begun. This difference is one that Keats takes up again and again in attempting to begin and in reflecting on beginnings. Given-to-be-read, a beginning cannot posit what it means. (19) And so, a beginning is also always a call to another to witness what may not have been experienced directly.

Politics and Beginning

Hannah Arendt suggests something similar about beginnings in her political philosophy. She begins On Revolution with the French Revolution; her thinking begins, in other words, with the same event to which Keats and other Romantic poets found themselves responding. "Revolutions," she writes, "are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning." (20) And she begins with a literary reading of the word "revolution." She focuses on the fact that "revolution," from the Latin revolvere, to roll back, refers both to a circular course or orbit and a dramatic change. "Revolution" can signify repetition (more of the same, as a chalk mark on one's tire revolves and so returns always to the same spot) or its opposite, a new beginning, a departure from all that has come before. In On Revolution, Arendt argues that the Fathers of the revolution did not mean to begin something new but "pleaded in all sincerity that they wanted to revolve back to old times when things had been as they ought to be" (44). For Arendt, the revolution, the force of the revolution as the beginning of something new, occurred unwittingly, as if by accident, without conscious intention. Later revolutionary figures, following the events of the French Revolution and hoping to bring about dramatic change, failed, suggests Arendt, precisely because they consciously intended to bring about something new.

A beginning is a beginning, Arendt suggests, only to the extent to which it cannot have been expected. It interrupts what one may have been led to expect, or even what one intended, given all that has come before. (21) As Arendt writes in The Human Condition, "It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened." (22) To actively seek to make a beginning one must expect what one will begin. As a result, one may simply bring about more of the same.

Arendt aligns the principle of beginning with the conditions of possibility of politics. Drawing from Augustine's political philosophy, she writes: "With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world" (177). Before the human, there were no beginnings because no possibility for surprise existed. With humanity, following Augustine's reasoning, surprise is possible. Man, the human, is a beginner, one capable of action, of calling into being that which did not exist before. Before the human, there were no beginnings and without beginnings, without the surprise of beginning, no freedom: "With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before" (177). Arendt argues that without the chance of something unexpected happening, there is no freedom and without freedom no politics. (23)

Arendt's larger argument in The Human Condition is that humanity seeks actively to resist this condition. Humanity, in other words, seeks actively to avoid beginning, preferring what is known and expected to what startles unexpectedly. This resistance to beginning is due in part to the fact that a beginning is also always a sign of one's ignorance. (24) A beginning, writes Arendt, "must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences." (25) The French Revolution constituted a beginning, but what "happened" is not what the Fathers wanted, expected, or intended to have happen. A beginning, as Keats's resolution discloses in "Sleep and Poetry," happens all too often beyond one's awareness, which means that it cannot have been expected even by the one who acts--like the Fathers of the French Revolution who wanted a revolution, not a revolution. One who begins is always dumb to what has been begun. Howsoever it be done, a beginning is not an object of cognition. It, instead, marks a gap between what is known or understood and what is enacted or done. There is then a very strange correlation between Keats's poetics (even though he focuses so intensely on figures of passivity: sleep, dreaming, indolence) and Arendt's politics, her political philosophy (with her strong calls for action).

Writing Politics

The final lines of "Sleep and Poetry" are complicated by the poet's claim that he leaves the lines as a father does a son, which, while a poetic convention, also foregrounds the fact that this paternal claim results from language's ability to posit a natural or biological relationship in the absence of the guarantee that one exists. The resolution to begin is followed almost immediately by the poet's admission that what was begun (what was written and so stands now "done") was missed--and so the poet must claim some relationship to his own writing after the fact. The claim of kinship cannot help but raise the relationship between poet and poem as a question. If one could take for granted some kinship with what one begins, then it would not be necessary to claim this kinship. Keats's resolution to begin turns on the chance that what is written, these lines, are not entirely his; he finds them awaiting him. Keats, with his resolution to begin, discovers the need to claim some relationship to writing (whatever it might be said to mean, whatever actions it may go on to perform). As Jacques Ranciere suggests in The Politics of Aesthetics, "By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words." (26) Following Arendt, this is true of all that she calls a "beginning" and to all that she links to freedom and the possibility of politics. One misses one's own beginnings--howsoever they be done. In this way, Keats's poems draw together "beginning" (as event and structure) and writing. One cannot fully know the significance of what one has written or what it will be possible to find there.

After "Sleep and Poetry," Keats returns to his preoccupation with beginnings in the preface to Endymion, where he struggles with his regret for making Endymion public. He attempts to ward off (though in attempting to ward off also, of course, invites) the negative reception the poem will receive from reviewers. His disavowal of the published poem also implies that he has not yet finished "beginning" the poem. Or, the proper beginning of the poem remains, in a sense, just out of reach and not yet known. Keats leaves off the 1817 volume with "Sleep and Poetry," resolving to begin "these lines," but the resolution to begin is quickly followed by lines that introduce the necessary, or at least possible, absence of the poet to the very beginning the poem marks. The existence of the lines comes as a surprise. Keats returns to the question of beginning in the opening lines of Endymion, thus demonstrating not simply a desire to begin, a desire both to announce and to know a beginning, but also an awareness of the ways beginnings bar full understanding. When Keats attempts to mark or describe--whenever he attempts to make--a beginning, the language of the poem discloses something more than can easily be accounted for; the language of the poem seems to open itself to ambiguity and undecidability.

Keats has been haunted, he writes in the opening lines of Endymion, by the story of Endymion and because the tale, like "an endless fountain of immortal drink" (1:23), pours into him, he will trace the story:

   Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I
   Will trace the story of Endymion,
   The very music of the name has gone
   Into my being, and each pleasant scene
   Is growing fresh before me as the green
   Of our own vallies: so I will begin
   Now ...
      (1:34-40)

In contrast to "Sleep and Poetry," in which Keats resolves to begin, here he announces his beginning with "so," "so I will begin." "So" either marks a decision ("and now" or "as a result") or offers itself as a simile. Just as the "name has gone into my being," so Keats will begin. Or, just as the pleasant scene turns green as the valleys, so Keats will begin. On the one hand the colon marks a break; it interrupts the syntax previously established. And with the break, the poet declares his desire to begin: "So I will begin / Now." "Now" is withheld for a moment as the syntax is carried to the next line. The story of Endymion has stayed with the poet and gone into his very being, but to begin requires an act of will. The effort to begin requires a break and a declaration: "I will now begin." Yet on the other hand, "so" establishes continuity with what precedes the colon. Each pleasant scene of Endymion grows before the poet as the valleys turn green. Just as the pleasant scenes have grown green, that is organically, so too will the poem begin without break or interruption, emerging organically from the very music of the name and like the green of the valleys. The opening of Endymion stages two competing senses of beginning: through trope (metaphor, like the valleys) or performance (the speech act, "I will"). Unclear however is whether the opening of Endymion attempts to merge trope and performance and so overcome the potential instability of the closing lines of "Sleep and Poetry" or if the opening of Endymion merely repeats and extends the unreadability that the previous poem discovers with its own attempt to begin. (27)

The above quoted lines tell the story of a beginning that the reviews of Endymion came to acknowledge even as they labored to contain a poet who seemed to them highly political. Reviewers of Endymion objected to Keats's style and aligned it with Leigh Hunt's and so with Hunt's politics. (28) John Gibson Lockhart writes of Endymion in Blackwood's: "this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless. Mr. Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney rhymes of the poet of Rimini." (29) And John Wilson Croker writes in the Quarterly Review:

   At first it appears to us, that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself
   and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at
   bouts-rimes.... He seems to us to write a line at random, and then
   he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested
   by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete
   couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. (30)

The early reviewers of Keats's volumes responded to what they considered Keats's "loose rhymes"--his departure from a more conservative poetic style. Keats's couplets do not always come to a close and instead the ideas exceed the form meant to hold them. As a result, he draws attention to the ways in which form polices content.

Lockhart quotes extensively from the opening of Endymion and is critical of the reasons that induced Keats to compose it, though he does not elaborate much on his criticisms. "The poem sets out the following exposition of the reasons which induced Mr. Keats to compose it," writes Lockhart, who then quotes the first 33 lines of the poem, breaking off the quotation just prior to the lines quoted above. He italicizes "therefore" and includes three exclamation points: "Therefore 'tis with full happiness that I / Will trace the story of Endymion!!!" (31) Dissatisfied with the reasons Keats offers in the opening lines for choosing Endymion, Lockhart is confused (or at least pretends confusion). "Therefore" is offered by way of explanation but at least for Lockhart this "therefore" does not suffice. Lockhart wants Keats to know what he has begun and why, but this would seem to be the thing that Keats does not know and in this way Endymion returns readers to the resolution to begin that concludes "Sleep and Poetry," a resolution made possible by a difference between what words mean and the actions they might perform.

Keats's interest in beginnings and his attention to the ways in which what words do may be distinct from what they mean, a difference that makes possible beginning even as it undoes what one knows about beginning(s), has consequences for his reviewers, just as Helen Vendler's attempt to locate Keats's "hidden beginnings" results in her own stuttering beginning. Keats focuses on the "music of the name" and extends his interest in form to the signifier "Endymion." From "Endymion," from the music of the name, Keats announces he will begin and move on. Because the music of the name has entered his being, Keats is inspired to trace the story. In both instances, the poet is figured as passive. The music does not inspire him to imagine something new, but merely to "trace"--as an almost mechanical or mindless activity--the story. As Croker complains, too often Keats seems more interested in the sounds of words than their semantic content. Instead of moving from idea to idea, Keats moves from sound to sound, allowing the rhyme sounds to determine the poem's content; this may always have been, it may continue to be, the purview of poets and one way of distinguishing poetry from prose, but Croker and Lockhart align an interest in the sound and shape of the signifier with a repugnant, even dangerous, politics. Lockhart breaks off his extended quotation just prior to Keats's announcement of his intention to follow the music of the name. Keats becomes fixated on Endymion, he suggests, because of the sound of the name ("The very music of the name has gone / Into my being"). In translating sound into semantic content, Keats finds in the "end" of Endymion the chance to begin the poem that will make him one of the poets. The music in the name that has gone into his being offers Keats a chance to begin--and it may be impossible to know for certain whether "being" refers to something prior to language or to the word itself (as an anagram for "begin") and to the authority to begin that is hidden in the word.

The negative reviews are critical of Keats's interest in words as words. Words make possible a beginning even in the absence of cognition and this beginning is something the reviewers align with a potentially disruptive politics. Of further interest, though, may be the ways in which Keats's attention to the "music of the name" (his interest in the ways rhyme precedes thought) is contagious and infects the language of those writing about Keats. Lockhart himself seems to allow the "music" of the word to propel his writing forward. An example may suffice. Lockhart writes, "To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless." This sentence is constructed around a loose pun, as the subject, "this hint," is sonically determined by the prepositional phrase; and the loose pun occasioned by the sound of Hunt's name carries the sentence forward as "indeed" becomes "needless." (32) Keats's investment in the material signifier gives rise to a mode of writing--an attention to writing--that is carried not only across Keats's own lines but also into the writing of others. This is an event that Keats's conservative reviewers repeat even in the attempt to put an end to the practice of writing that gives Keats his beginning. Just as Keats traces the story, so too do Keats's reviewers trace Keats. In this way, Keats's focus on words makes something happen in the writing of those attempting to respond to and curtail the forms of attention Keats's writing makes possible. Keats's readers bear witness to his beginnings.

For Beginners

I have borrowed the title for this essay from the series of books published recently that introduce readers to particularly difficult philosophers through cartoons and word balloons, the For Beginners series (Marx for Beginners, Heidegger for Beginners, Derrida for Beginners, etc.). A number of similar series have emerged on the market in response to the difficulty of literary theory; the list includes, among others, Oxford's "Very Short Introductions" and Norton's "How to Read X" series. Literary theory may not in fact be dead, as has often been suggested, but word balloons may be required to make it "live." To reconcile the force of beginning that emerges in Keats and Arendt with the notion of beginning at play in the For Beginners series, or for that matter the notion of beginning at work in any "beginner's guide," may be quite difficult, since a beginning, following Arendt and Keats, cannot have a guide, one who knows how to arrive at the unexpected. The very idea of a guide suggests the possibility of knowing what is to be expected and so precludes in advance the very surprise that constitutes a beginning. A "beginner's guide" might, in effect, be one way to prevent the occurrence of the unexpected.

But what is at stake for beginning in Keats is not simply learning to choose the unexpected over the expected, as if the unexpected were inherently more valuable. Precisely because beginnings question one's ability to know them as beginnings (in advance or as they happen), a beginning is not an event one welcomes or rejects. With the human, suggests Arendt in The Human Condition, the principle of beginning came into the world. And she outlines the ways human society protects itself from the possible disruptions beginnings make possible even though humanity cannot be rid of beginnings without ridding the world of itself. One is (a) beginning. (33) For Arendt the fact that the human is a beginner results in a call to action. For Keats, though, it results in a defense of passivity.

A poem like "Ode on Indolence" may help Keats's "beginnings" to emerge. (34) If beginnings are possible only because there is a difference--one that cannot easily be overcome--between knowledge and action, between what is understood and what is done, then what appears as indolence may constitute a beginning as well. One cannot know in advance: "How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not? / How came ye muffled in so hush a masque" (11-12), writes Keats. One who begins might just look like one sitting idly by. Keats's passivity, his sometimes hard-fought indolence, is not activity in disguise; it stands as a reminder of the ways beginnings are not available to phenomenological models of perception. A beginning? Where? "I knew ye not."

This account of beginning, discovered in Keats, and in particular, as I have discussed, in the closing lines of "Sleep and Poetry" and the opening lines of Endymion, may be particularly difficult for readers of Keats to acknowledge precisely because calls to action are not easily avoided. One feels today a steadily increasing demand to be always doing something, to be always "up" and "on," ready to take on what comes next--ready to begin (hence an increasing addiction to "5 hour energy," part of late capitalism's insurance that consumption not only continue but also increase). One must finish what one is doing--be done with it--so that one can begin something new. But this perceived need to begin in all too knowingly a fashion is at odds with, it labors to overcome, the discontinuity of perception and cognition that makes possible a beginning for Keats. Precisely because Keats misses his beginnings, beginning is not something Keats chooses (just as readers of Keats find themselves repeating Keats without choosing to).

Over the centuries, the most common response to Keats's passivity has been to view his poetry as apolitical, as laboring to opt out of history. Keats's investment in beginnings does not offer readers any concrete recommendations for political action, precisely because action is too often conceived around what gets done. Instead, he aims to preserve the chance that beginnings are always elsewhere, known after the fact and only via marks and traces (as Keats mindlessly "traces" the story of Endymion). And though this keeps Keats from offering a program of action, the preservation of beginning (the awkward resolution to begin something one has already missed--howsoever it be done) keeps politics--and the chance of beginning--from coming to an end, as ideology, as what Arendt calls totalitarianism. In the close of "Sleep and Poetry" Keats must leave his fines as a father does a son only because it is not clear "howsoever they be done," only because, that is, he is unsure how they came to be composed and so unsure of all that they will do. The poem-as-written and so given-to-be-read discloses this difference, a difference that makes possible another beginning precisely because it happens unawares, recognized belatedly in the attempt to begin Endymion a few months later.

Keats's preoccupation with beginning, one that he returns to throughout his short career, offers a chance to rethink poetry as a mode of political thought, as a way of giving-to-he-read contradictions that one might more often look to overcome in the effort to intervene in the struggles of one's day. (35) In a later letter to Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins returns to his focus on Keats and beginnings. In response to the view of Keats as a dreamer, a poet only ever partly of this world, a poet laboring to escape politics and history--the view of Keats that remains more or less intact today after almost two hundred years--Hopkins writes: "[Keats] lived in mythology and fairyland the life of a dreamer. Nevertheless I feel I see in him the beginnings of something opposite to this." (36) It is not clear what Hopkins means by "the beginnings of something opposite to this." He does not go on to explain in any detail. A poet who does not live the life of a dreamer? A poet concerned not with fairyland but with the world he is so often accused of renouncing? Striking, however, is Hopkins's return to the word "beginnings." "Beginning" offers Hopkins a chance to rethink Keats's relationship to what he has so often been accused of renouncing. (37)

The commitment to an apolitical Keats may be one more sign of our resistance to beginning, a resistance to the principle of beginning that Keats staked his poetry on in leaving it, from the start, to others. But here the rethinking of politics that Keats offers, however unsatisfying it may seem, is legible: politics is always just beginning, just about to begin but also conditioned by the chance to begin (and the instability beginnings introduce, preserve, and pass along). This is precisely where Keats leaves off, where he leaves us. Likely, one wants more from those one approaches for help thinking about politics, precisely because politics is over-determined by a definition of action wholly dependent on doing "something." But the simpler point may be all the more powerful for its simplicity. There is beginning. And so there must be politics. (38) Only because the world is not programmable is it possible to (not) intervene.

Precisely because one is ignorant of all that one does, of the significance of what one does (such is the absence of oneself to oneself that writing marks and preserves), one has a chance to begin, even though in beginning one is exposed to an ignorance that cannot fully be claimed. The politics of beginning is offered as an attempt to preserve and pass along one's ignorance, always also a sign of the very freedom to make a beginning, and so a sign, a way of acknowledging, that others are, that others precede and will come along after. In this way beginning too may be the displaced name for a linguistic predicament, if also the condition of the possibility of politics-a reminder that one is just beginning, the most common and least possible thing to know.

Clemson University

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(1.) A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 230. I would like to thank the editors of "Reading Keats, Thinking Politics," Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun, as well as Anne-Lise Francois, Erin Goss, and Eric Lindstrom for their insightful comments and suggestions for revision.

(2.) The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.

(3.) Studies in Poetry (London, 1907), 204. See also Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12. The reading of Keats as indifferent to politics continues, as P. M. S. Dawson argues in "Poetry in an Age of Revolution," where Keats is described as "the most apolitical of the great Romantic poets." In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 49.

(4.) The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1.

(5.) Of Keats's poem "To Autumn" in particular, McGann writes in "Keats and the Historical Method in Criticism," "[the poem] is an attempt to 'escape' the period which provides the poem with its context, and to offer its readers the same opportunity of refreshment." Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 1023.

(6.) In recent decades the sense of Keats as uninterested in history and politics has been questioned. See for instance the special issue of Studies in Romanticism 25 (Summer 1986) edited by Susan Wolfson; Nicholas Roe, ed., Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent, and Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The history of criticism on Keats and politics is nicely summarized by Roe in the opening pages of John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, esp. 3-7. Roe finds in Keats a powerful political voice for reform. Instead of viewing Keats as turning away from politics, Roe attends "to Keats's eloquence as a representative voice of the most vital sector of contemporary English culture: that is, the culture of dissent in which ideological opposition to the consequent exclusion from the establishment formed the intellectual dynamic of enlightened progress in political, religious, aesthetic, and educational matters" (15). Roe pursues a rich re-imagining of Keats's relationship to politics, one that is offered in direct opposition to the dominant view of Keats and one that returns attention to the ways in which Keats's poetry was initially received. The political attacks on Keats published in Blackwell's Edinburgh Magazine aligned Keats with the Cockney school of poetry; in portraying Keats as immature and unworldly, these attacks defended conservative cultural values against Cockney politics. The dominant reading of Keats as apolitical emerges, then, with political attacks against Keats.

(7.) Robert Gittings, ed., The Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 398. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited as Letters by page in the text. See also Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).

(8.) John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). The poem is found on pages 361-73. The quoted lines are 142-43. Future references to Keats's poems will be to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text by lines. Keats links poetry to survival, to a death "felt" if not fully experienced. See also Brendan Corcoran, "Keats's Death: Toward a Posthumous Poetics," Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 2 (Summer 2009).

(9.) Romantic Poetry and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143.

(10.) See Susan Wolfson, "Keats enters History," in Keats and History.

(11.) In offering a new account of Keats's relationship to politics Nicholas Roe powerfully reverses the more familiar story of Keats's total indifference. But in what ways does such a reversal leave intact the definition of politics brought to bear on Keats's poems, a definition of politics that Keats may be interrogating? As Roe explains his purpose: "I have ... sought to show how Keats's poems responded to and negotiated with contemporary history, rather than presenting an aesthetic resort in which to 'escape' or 'evade' the world" (Keats and the Culture of Dissent, 266). Keats's poems are not divorced from contemporary politics. Keats is a poet deeply invested in the political struggles of his day. But in redeeming Keats from New Historicist criticisms and demonstrating the numerous ways in which Keats engaged with contemporary politics, Roe repeats and reconfirms the opposition between history on the one hand and poetry on the other, an opposition that privileges the real-world power of politics to change history over the comparatively weak power of poetry, which merely responds to history. With the help of Roe's subtle personification, poetry responds to history but the reverse does not seem the case. Poetry is not something to which history and contemporary politics respond.

(12.) See Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

(13.) One need not turn to his letters for Keats's thinking about belatedness fully to emerge, as Charles Rzepka has recently shown in "'Cortez: Or Balboa, or Somebody like That': Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' Sonnet," Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002). While many readers of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" take the reference to Cortez (and not Balboa) as a mistake, Rzepka argues that the inclusion of Cortez helps underscore "the poignant theme, announced in the very title of [the] sonnet, of the belatedness of the poet's own sublime ambitions" (39). Like Keats, who only encounters Homer after Chapman, Cortez looks on the Pacific only after Balboa already had done so before him. In Rzepka's reading, the poem is more about indebtedness and belated repetition than the power of origination.

(14.) "The Experiential Beginnings of Keats's Odes," Studies in Romanticism 12, no. 3 (Summer 1973). For an extended reading of Vendler's essay, see Christopher R. Miller, "Fine Suddenness: Keats's Sense of a Beginning," in Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

(15.) "Experiential Beginnings," 606.

(16.) When Keats introduces Endymion with regret in the published prefatory remarks, he finds it full of inexperience and immaturity. The published poem is offered as "a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished" (Complete Poems, 64). The very presence of the prefatory remarks announces that Endymion is "finished" (in that it has been published) but Keats simultaneously implies with the remarks that he has not yet properly begun to write the poem. I thank Chuck Rzepka for this important insight.

(17.) "Experiential Beginnings," 591-92.

(18.) Because a "father" is always possibly absent at the moment of conception of "his" child, the name "father" must be claimed. See also related discussions of the "Blessed Babe" passage from Book 2 of William Wordsworth's The Prelude in which the mute child claims manifest kindred with "an earthly soul." What the passage shows, however, are the ways in which language promises filial preservation even as it relentlessly undoes its own claims. See Paul de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 90-91; and Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 44-57.

(19.) See also Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003): "by making legible the fact that poetic words do

not understand what they express, or feel what they inspire, poetry ... opens aesthetics to the contingency of history, and the constitutive uncertainty of futurity" (171).

(20.) Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 21.

(21.) In this way, a beginning has the status of an event or what Paul de Man somewhat enigmatically calls history; something happens with "the materiality of actual history" (The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 262).

(22.) The Human Condition, 177-78.

(23.) As Arendt's quote also shows, a beginning is the chance to say something a second time. Key to the principle of beginning is "another way of saying," the chance to say something "another way," to say another way what has been said. In this way, a beginning (and the freedom to begin) is linked to metaphor, to figure, to speaking "other ways" or "otherwise"--in other words, to poetry.

(24.) For more on the ways in which beginnings are supplanted through lies and ideology, see for instance Cathy Caruth, "Lying and History," in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 79-94.

(25.) The Human Condition, 192.

(26.) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

(27.) Keats returns to his first volume and yet, as Karen Swann has recently suggested, Keats's project "of image-making begins ... with the poem [Endymion]." "Endymion's Beautiful Dreamers," in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21. See also Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: the Origins of a Style (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988): "'Romantic retirement' gains a whole new dimension with Keats. Imagine the solitude of a young man in a seaside rooming house in April, a borrowed picture of Shakespeare his only companion: a man with nothing to do for a set period of time but write the pastoral epic which would, literally, make him" (7).

(28.) See William Keach, "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 182-96.

(29.) Keats, The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 104.

(30.) Critical Heritage, 112.

(31.) Critical Heritage, 105.

(32.) One can certainly cite many examples of such moments in the body of criticism surrounding Keats, and examples are not limited to it. But Keats's poems do seem particularly effective in this regard. William Keach begins his essay, "Cockney Couplets," with a similar echo: "The focus of this paper--Keats's couplet writing in the Poems of 1817 and in Endymion of 1818--may seem less than inviting if you take the dim view of this poetry that still prevails" (182, my emphasis). The "music of the name" Endymion reverberates across the dash with the "dim" view of Keats's poetry that prevails.

(33.) Both Keats and Arendt offer a chance to think beginning as event (and not as being).

(34.) In her article on Keats's experiential beginnings, Helen Vendler discusses Keats's major odes with the exception of "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode on Indolence." In his response to Vendler's essay, Christopher R. Miller discusses "Ode to Psyche" at some length. "Ode on Indolence," however, remains absent from these discussions that privilege what can be experienced as a beginning.

(35.) In this way, I extend arguments by Forest Pyle, Robert Kaufman, and Emily Sun. See for instance Forest Pyle's The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and "Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley," Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 427-59; Robert Kaufman's "Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde," Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 354-84; and Emily Sun's "Facing Keats with Winnicott: On the New Therapeutics of Poetry," Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 57-75.

(36.) A Hopkins Reader, 237.

(37.) See also Daniel P. Watkins, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989). Watkins argues that Keats's poetry is political "from the beginning" (22), as if beginning itself conditioned the possibility of Keats's political poetry.

(38.) In his last poems to Fanny, Keats is also aware, however, of the difficulties of beginning. The ignorance that beginnings disclose may always be transformed into yet another means to prevent beginnings. To embrace ignorance is, unavoidably, also a means to evade the instability beginnings introduce and make possible. When Keats writes, "What can I do to drive away / Remembrance from my eyes" (Complete Poems, 1-2 [page 374]), he is struggling to forget an event, here the sight of his beloved, that he cannot stand to remember any longer. Were he able to drive away remembrance he would solve, in a sense, one of the difficulties of the human condition and the potential pain of surprise. "Let me begin my dream," he writes in "To Fanny" (Complete Poems, 6 [376]). Towards the end of his life, Keats dramatizes the need for relief from the contingency of beginnings, as he longs to transform beginning into a means to evade the very force of a beginning.