The Odes of John Keats

by Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.

Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry--thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural--are brought to bear on it at once.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction, Classics, Romanticism, Literature

342 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 1983

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is one of the best books of literary criticism I've ever read, a nearly overwhelming demonstration of Helen Vendler's powers as a reader, which are primarily the powers of imaginative identification. Perhaps the reason Helen Vendler reads Keats so well is that she reads as Keats wrote, immersed in that famous negative capability that allows reader or writer to be not herself but the other, the object of her contemplation. To Vendler, this means primarily reading the poem along the line as if one were writing it and asking at every moment of choice, Why would I do it this way and not another? If I am Keats, why am I writing an ode? Why am I rhyming these particular words? Why am I listing these adjectives in this particular order? etc. Of course, she does not plague us with cheesy rhetorical questions as I am doing here but dazzles us with the insights such investigations yield. This is the closest kind of reading--not the invasive closeness of the detective with his magnifying glass, looking for clues by which to convict or acquit, but an intimate sympathy with the lyric speaker, letting oneself think with another's language for a while.

If the literary imagination I'm praising sounds too mystic, know that Vendler's is backed up by an immense amount of hard research, the most interesting of which is her deep familiarity with what Keats himself read (a familiarity made possible by the Houghton Library's ownership of Keats's personal library). In ode after ode, she traces words and phrases and syntactical constructions back to Milton, to Spenser, to Dryden's translations of the Georgics, and, of course, to Shakespeare, supporting her claims of influence with reference to underlinings and marginalia in his books.

Ultimately her book makes the argument that, taken in the order that she chooses more for narrative convenience than logic, the odes form a kind of sequence through which Keats more and more courageously refined his ideas about art and the artist's relationship to the mortal world. While I find I can't take the sequence theory literally, the effect of the argument is undeniable. By the time she reaches her sixty-page explication of "To Autumn," she has laid the groundwork for understanding that poem as the culmination of every concern on Keats's mind in that last year of his career as a poet, everything that he had to master in order to achieve the almost rippleless equanimity that plays across the surface of that poem. I can't imagine putting down her book at the end without the conviction of having experienced more deeply and felt more fully than ever what must undoubtedly be among the richest and most beautiful poems in our language.

It is as if I had never really understood before what it means to read.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helen Vendler, esteemed literary critic and Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, states, near the terminus of her great book concerning the Odes of John Keats, that "(t)he end of commentary is, then, to recite the poem anew, but with a sense of the multiple choices made from all possible language-events in order for this text to be produced." And she has, in the preceding three hundred and thirty pages, done exactly that.
Centered on seven discrete chapters, each treating a distinct poetic effort, Ms. Vendler's "The Odes of John Keats" is a tour-de-force that asserts, in these self-same chapters, that these efforts should be treated as one organic whole, rather than as 'stand-alone' efforts as they have been in the past. And, in fact, the book largely proves this assertion in a prominent and comprehensive manner. For we see the growth of Keats from the initial odes ("Indolence" and "Psyche") where there exists a dualism between mind and body, spirit and sense, and, additionally, where Keats art, always rich in sensual details, fails to integrate these two essential elements. Then, in the remainder of the Odes ("Nightingale," "Urn," "Hyperion," and "Melancholy"), Keats, step by step, and process by process, hones and develops his art to a fine sharpness. This all comes to a peak in "To Autumn," a poem where Keats, by eschewing detail, abstraction, and concepts (think "Truth and Beauty"), finds the perfect twinning of sense and thought, one inseparable from the other, that is the characteristic of all 'true' poetry. Along the way the reader is treated to explications of the poems that are detailed and acutely perceptive. This is the best book I've encountered on the poetry of John Keats, and it should be perused by all who are interested in genius-level poetry as well as criticism that serves to explain the aforesaid verse. Fine work!

[Zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal scholarship. Inspiring both in respect to the vision of Keats' odes it offers, and in its suggestion of what literary scholarship can/should be. I don't have much more to say because I lack knowledge to critique the ideas, but the book simultaneously was persuasive while making me want to look into the differing opinions she cites and fully explore the world of Keats. This is the core of what academic literary scholarship should be, my only worry is that there aren't enough works out there that reward this level of investigation the way Vendler reveals Keats does (but I'm unsure on this point, and it is something very important for me to figure out).

[Georgie · Rating 2 out of 5]

dnf at 40%

i feel like every chapter is twice the length it needed to be -- and what is said is... lackluster?

i really wish i'd liked this, but the best lines are buried in such dense paragraphs, and these lines are so undeveloped in comparison

:(

[Jodi Bhachu-Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ode on a Grecian Urn haunts me to this day. In part because I had to analyse it for my IB English Lit oral exam, in part because it's so beautiful. But how can it not be when, like so many Romantic poets, Keats was the perfect sad boy?

[Caomhghain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler was the master of poem analysis and this is one of her best. It can be, and is, argued that she overdid it but she finds everything in a poem - language, contents, links, structures, possibilities and more. It can be overwhelming but the poems are so much richer when you reread them.

[Michael Loveabudge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit mad but still fun

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, beautiful and moving.

[Jason Koo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some brilliant readings tucked inside a book that is every chapter about 20 pages too long. She just overdoes it. And she is much smarter on the early odes than the later ones--especially on Indolence, which she brilliantly argues is the seminal poem of the Odes as as sequence. After the Nightingale chapter, she seems to run out of fresh insights. The chapter on To Autumn is just incredibly long, as if she's trying to prove by her voluminosity just how important the ode is. We get it, Helen, To Autumn is the triumphant culmination of all of Keats's work. No need to spend 55 pages belaboring this point.

[Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler is seriously the best. Her book Poems, Poets, and Poetry is almost single-handedly responsible for my love of poetry. This book was just as good and it focused on some of my very favorite poems. It was a huge help when I wrote my Ph.D. application, as her analysis of "Ode to a Nightingale" is nothing short of brilliant.

[Kevin Albrecht]

Recommended here: http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/0...

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite possibly the best existing criticism on Keats' Odes, though I do not personally agree with the entirety of Vendler's interpretations.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent lit crit that is neither fanciful nor biographically or politically obsessed,

[Sarah Key · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful criticism. I love Vendler's study of contradictions, the way she folds the language of Keats's letters into her criticism, and the continuous build toward her chapter on "To Autumn."

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vendler's book on Keats's Odes is awesome - she lays out her methodology, and then dives in deep with the Odes so readers can get a sense of what makes them tick.