The Politics of the Spider

Abstract

(Translated by Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun) REGARDING THE QUESTION OF JOHN KEATS AND POLITICS, A CERTAIN number of things are well known: a modest birth whereby men of rank count him among those young men of the people who try their hand unduly at works of writing and thought for which they are not fit; education in a progressive school followed by medical training, befitting the development of a materialist rationalism as well as an attentiveness to the conditions of the health of individuals and the public good; a solid contempt for religious superstition; membership in a circle of liberal artists and thinkers who opposed the reactionary spirit that prevailed after the fall of Napoleon and were sympathetic to the cause of men fighting for their thwarted political rights. The classic question is whether one can draw from this list something that animates his poetry as such: the question of politics in the poetry of John Keats. Two responses divide the field. The first claims that, while the sympathies of Keats as an individual are clearly on the side of progress, one encounters in his poems neither the Wordsworthian claims for the dignity of the humblest beings and things, nor the calls to rebellion against the social order of Shelley or Byron, but rather a dream of ageless beauty that declares its self-sufficiency. The other response claims that the poem's supposed purity is founded on ignorance of its context. Autumn was written a month after the Peterloo Massacre, and one need only read the journal of Keats's friends, The Examiner, to see established in the poem--through the mediation of a poem by Spenser--a clear similitude between the abundance of the harvests and the just redistribution of the products of labor symbolized by the sign of the balance. (1) To this, however, one may in turn respond that, even if such concerns inhabited the spirit of Keats, it is another kind of balance that defines the justice of the poem: that which equates the season of mists with that of fruitfulness, and the productive activity of autumn with the indolence of a divinity sitting careless on a granary floor or drowsed with the fume of poppies on a half-reaped furrow. The season of fruitfulness does not signify, then, the poem's engagement in work that serves to create wealth and justice. Conversely, the goddess's calm repose does not signify the consecration of an ideal of a classic and serene beauty, careless of political and social turbulence. That which gives not meaning but occasion to the poem is the very correlation itself between fog and fecundity, sleep and creative activity. This identity between contraries defines the relationship of the poem to its subject, and the relationship of the subject to all that could be associated with it: the passage of time or the ageless fecundity of nature, the dreams of a golden age and the figures of mythological landscapes or the reality of the labor of men. This identity defines the relationship because in itself it defines the poem as a certain weave of the material and the immaterial, of passivity and activity. That which this weave determines, then, is neither the relationship of the poet to politics, nor the presence of politics in the poem. It is the very politics of the poetry, the manner in which poetry configures the space in which its productions are inscribed. Poetry makes this space by instituting a triple community. First of all, the community between the elements of which the poems are woven: the words and the presences they evoke--the perfumes of field flowers or palaces in the clouds, the familiar songs of birds or pages of mythology manuals--these are the figures, the stories that assemble the figures, the universes that the stories unfold or the rhythms that accompany their appearances and disappearances. Second, the community between the poems and other poems: those the poet writes and those he did not write; those that remain visions of his spirit, dreams of idleness or dreams of the night; those that others have written and from which he takes nourishment as others take nourishment from his; those, finally, of the sensibility of the new revolutionary age that makes visible as mute poems the games of the child, the gaze of the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow, or that of the city-apprentice when he looks upon the Lord-Mayor's show. …