IN A LETTER TO COVENTRY PATMORE, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS DESCRIBES John Keats as of of Romantic movement, by which he means one of poets who helped start 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 of beginners seems almost anachronistic. But Hopkins's letter evokes another sense of beginner, one on which I will focus. An awareness of Keats as beginner--one invested in principle of beginning--lurks within Hopkins's letter. Of poets one might associate with Romantic movement--Wordsworth, Tighe, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Hemans--Keats of 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 beginner? Who or what beginner? What and when beginning? How might Keats's poems be understood as beginners? These questions might take one in any number of directions, but as philosopher Hannah Arendt, to whom we shall turn, suggests in opening to The Human Condition, beginning and not ending, natality and not mortality, may be central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. (2) Beginning is, for Arendt, political because it of, and not beyond, world. Calling Keats a beginner makes possible rethinking of Keats's relationship to politics. The event of beginning, I show with specific reference to closing lines of Sleep and Poetry and opening lines of Endymion, exposes fundamental gap between cognition and perception, understanding and experience; for Keats, I argue, this gap makes possible political commitment even as it complicates very idea of political action. One of Beginners Almost from start, Romantic poets have been accused of turning away from active involvement in politics, understood as instrumental action or intervention in world of human affairs. The defining turn of poet inward to explore his own thoughts and feelings, it argued, constitutes simultaneously turn away from poet's own historical moment. Turning inward, poet turns away from others. Keats for instance most famous for addressing not his fellow man but nightingale and an urn. Indeed, of Romantic poets accused of turning away from history and politics, Keats often prime example. As Stopford A. Brooke writes in 1907: [Keats] has ... no vital interest in present, none in man as whole, none in political movement of human thought, none in future of mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity. (3) Brooke offers particularly damning picture of Keats but it picture of Keats largely still in play. It view of poet, in other words, that we have largely inherited. Keats: dreamer-poet far removed from (and even uninterested in) world of human affairs. More damning than Brooke's argument that Keats has no interest in the political movement of human thought Jerome McGann's later suggestion that Romantic poets use art as means to escape world. It one thing to take no interest in politics; it quite another thing actively to flee all things political. In response to world turned topsy-turvy--with French Revolution's dramatic failure, marked by violence of Terror and rise of Napoleon as dictator--the Romantic poet, argues McGann, sticks his head in sand (or, perhaps more precisely, in idealized work of art). Romantic poetry, writes McGann, is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby actual human issues with which poetry concerned are resituated in 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 prime example. …