Look Round For Poetry by Brian McGrath

Author:Brian McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

5. Keats for Beginners

I would like to begin before beginning.

—Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, volume 1

The previous chapter, “On the Poetry of Posthumous Election,” turned specific attention toward a twentieth-century poem by Lucille Clifton. I risk a potentially jarring return to nineteenth-century poems with my final two chapters, this one which takes poems by John Keats as points of departure and the next which does the same with poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. But if the opening chapters of Look Round for Poetry explore the untimeliness of poetic tropes and figures through various possible conjunctions—as tropes of lyric address, for instance, mingle with representative democracy—then with these last chapters I return to Romantic poems and let political questions come to the fore, as poems by Keats and Shelley theorize what it might mean to live amidst the possibility of conjunction, juxtaposition, or constellation, what it might mean, in other words, to live among others. In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe identifies the contemporary social, economic, and political pressures that “engulf us in the hallucinatory dream of a ‘community without strangers,’” a world of people who “aspire only to take their leave of others.”1 A community without strangers is one that precludes from the start the possibility of surprise. As I show in this chapter, Keats’s poems address this hallucinatory dream through the trope of beginning. Like poems, and the grammatical and rhetorical structures that shape them, beginnings are always possibly a little untimely. They can surprise. And the surprise of beginning is possible only because one lives among others, Keats’s poems suggest. In my final chapter I extend this insight by focusing on the force of prepositions, specifically the force of the preposition “among,” in several of Shelley’s most famous poems.

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.2 Given that Keats published his first book of poems 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 that I turn round in this chapter. 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—Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Keats is “one of the beginners,” as if only some Romantic poets ought to be considered “beginners,” as if only some poets are interested in the question of beginning. 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?

Such questions can seem far from the discourse of politics but in The Human Condition Hannah Arendt suggests that beginning “may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.”3 For Arendt, politics exists only because sometimes something unanticipated occurs.

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