Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

by Anahid Nersessian

" When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people in it."

In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn"-are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life-of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet-as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.

The book emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry; but more, it "is a love between me and Keats, and not just Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses-and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's enduring work.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Criticism, Literature, Literary Criticism, 21st Century

148 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 10, 2021

Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredible dive into the life and times and above all the poetry of Keats. it's a wonderful rush! The prose is so clear, and the author's enthusiasms so infectious, that this literary analysis of Keats's odes was a joy to read. It dives deep into each ode, but never in a ponderous way, and never in a way that was less than revelatory.

I don't think the author knows how delightful her book is. My only criticism about this book is that Professor Nersessian should omit the first sentence where she declares "If you've never read anything on Keats's odes before, this book should not be your first step." That's wrong. I am decidedly -not- a Keats scholar and I never felt condescended to, or left behind in any way. I felt swept along.

The literary analysis here reminds me of George Steiner, only without the pomp. I learned so much, not only about Keats, and not only about these poems, but also about how to read, and how to pay attention to what I read. How to hear the language on the page. Just as it happens sometimes when you go to an art exhibit or a concert or a play, and come out with all your senses heightened--I came out of this book with all of my senses heightened.

Wonderful. Everyone should read it.

[su · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse."

Keats is my favorite poet, romantic, literary figure, you name it. For so many of us, the appeal of his poetry is a personal one, that manages to speak to us beyond all the lush and almost sumptuous imagery of something more personal yet universal.

Nersessian achieves what the Odes mean to her, both as an individual and more generally, as a 21st century contemporary to the readers while at the same time offering close reading of the odes. The language is simple yet alluring, making you want to read more. It is a practice in speaking with the past, but this time, it is not one-sided; these essays offer up our present to the past as much as listening what the past has to say.

[elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is something special, and a text that really found me at a perfect time. literary criticism that left me genuinely invigorated(!) and excited to continue to read and write about poetry. nersessian's voice is potent and honest, i knew next to nothing about keats before going in (other than that i had to figure out how to write an essay about ode to a nightingale for my ecocriticism class) and i've come out the other side having fallen sort of in love with his writing (but even more with nersessian's).
my favourite chapters were ode to a nightingale and ode to psyche :)

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars. Anahid Nersessian's analysis of Keat's Odes was everything and then some. Here she has woven together one of the best literary landscapes I've ever held in my hands. Truly after my own heart with references to Diane di Prima, Lauren Berlant, Barthes, Anne Boyer, Marx & Jenny, Pasolini, and Freud. What a way to dissect poetry. I came out of this book a better reader and - to loosely quote from the intro - as someone who knows what words mean.

We are warned right away that this shouldn't be our introduction to Keat's, but I have to admit it was my first time reading his poetry and I'm so glad it was, because Nersessian is a better teacher than I could have asked for.

[Rebecca H.]

I wrote about this book here: https://readingindie.substack.com/p/k...

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

@ Maia Decker: thank you for the recommendation, truly SUCH a good book <33

that's all! if you like poetry and some analysis, please pick it up, it's wonderful and it's short :)

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite kind of criticism is the kind that isn't just a close reading, but rather the kind that says "This is why this work is important *to me*." I've often struggled, especially recently, with why to bother going back to read classic literature when there are so many amazing contemporary books, which at least nominally should speak more directly to my concerns and interests and context. By combining personal narrative, a contemporary point of view, and rigorous scholarship, Nersessian shows in great depth why Keats's Great Odes speak to her and what they say, and in doing so she shows me why they ought to matter to me.

Yet I think what is even more remarkable about this book is how Nersessian uses a group of 200-year-old poems to tell her own story, too. She does this sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely or by reference, which strikes me as a particularly poetic way of approaching personal storytelling. What I know of poetry is that the way the poet says something shapes the way I receive it, often making the experience all the more impactful by taking me on a less direct path. And this is how I received this story as well. As often happens with an excellent poem, I don't know that I could necessarily tell you the details of that story, nor even articulate exactly what the feeling of the story is. Nevertheless, the experience of the story felt potent and alive.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredible look into Keats and some of his odes. Through the author's insights I was able to see how these odes reveal some of Keats' life but they also pertain to our own as we go through love and loss. I now want to review Keats' work over and over. What a gift from Keats.

[Conor]

Disappointing. I listened to Nersessian on a podcast years ago talking about the Grecian Urn chapter, and it was a refreshing, if at the same time harrowing, recalibration of the poem's context and irony. I wanted to see how the other odes would fare under this semi-biographical, semi-political approach. Unfortunately though, I just don't think most of the other points in the book are very well-argued. Nersessian notes early on that she's written this book for non-specialists, which I appreciate as a gesture, but which I fear provoked the noticeable gaps throughout. For instance, she needed to argue more rigorously why the last stanza of Nightingale invokes a group or sociality, not least because there is such a clear emphasis on private reflection, on listening to oneself, the social remove the Romantics are known for. Similarly, the last chapter on Autumn didn't look at the poem for all that long, mostly dealing with the concept of a beautiful poem in the context of political tumult. To her credit, that chapter starts towards the key revelation (key for her, since it hampers much of her reading) that Keats wasn't the lovely chap she needs him to be. But fitting the unfortunate pattern of the book, this arrives way too late, giving no space to be fleshed out, its rendering consequently half-baked. There are glimpses of brilliance sprinkled throughout the book, and maybe I'm being curmudgeonly due to a pre-existing scepticism about the Romantics, or Lit Crit that tries to be hip before it tries to be insightful, but I don't think this ended up being the book I or Nersessian wanted it to be.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fantastic. What a project!

"Like many kids who don't look like their classmates, who cart around odd names and are told, loudly and sternly, by the teacher that when they choose construction paper on which to draw a self-portrait they had better not choose white, since anyone can see that their skin is much darker than that, I figured out early that WASPs couldn't be trusted with their own culture. I aligned myself with the literary past not to be like them but as a higher order of civilization, a bulwark against hte barbarian hordes of saddle-shoe blondes who didn't know the difference between Iran and Iraq but took the Gulf War as their latest provocation to kick me literally in the teeth" (14).

"[Ode on a Grecian Urn] does not want you to buy what its speaker is selling. It gives him a platform and waits, like the urn, to see how we will respond. Will we choose to believe in an art that launders pain and calls that an ethics?" (55–6).

"He refuses to make excuses for the poem [in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre], to discharge its difficult energies in the vapid, hysterical idiom of 'complicity.' Instead, he forces us to inhabit an excruciating contradiction: we are attached, despite everything, to this place that has been weaponized against us, where the earth ingests our oozings and its ambient noises muffle our screams. We are attached, too, to poems about this place, especially when they commute suffering to metaphor—a half-reaped furrow, a choir of ululating bugs" (127).

[Bailey :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenal book. Nersessian warns in her introduction to not read this text if this is to be your introduction to Keats--a claim with which I must respectfully and entirely disagree. Keats has, as I'm sure he has for many readers of poetry, emerged and submerged my periphery, appearing as inspiration or citation for many of my favorite writers, though I am yet to read his work myself. In a strange way, I've gotten so far in this journey that I'm tempted to keep it that way. It's rather nice, existing in the brilliance of my contemporaries rather than seeking to uncover some 200-year-old brilliance for myself. And Nersessian is up there in the most brilliant of our contemporaries. These essays, meditations, and occasional lyric, prosaic pieces paint such an incomporably remarkable portrait working alongside and against Keats' poetics. I'm in awe of this book. I've loved its musings. My favorite essays are the ones responding to "Ode to Melancholy," "To Autumn," and the book's postscript. This book is a phenomenal achievement.

[Elizabeth Kerns · Rating 3 out of 5]

storygraph 3.5.

i read two chapters of this book for a poetics reading group and am going back to read the entire book. the form and analytical approach is super creative and engaging, and i think has the potential to be very effective.

her analysis and the overall cohesion of the book fell flat for me, though. i’m no keats scholar, but the marxist superimposition wasn’t convincing per her explanation, and i fundamentally disagree with her discussion and explanation of negative capability. revolutionary thought is cool and all, but redefining words to make points you want to make is irksome.

anyway! this was a cool read and i’m glad i went back to read the entire thing, even if i disagreed with the author at many points and wanted more of a connecting thread through the text. would recommend yfor people interested in poetics or alternative academic forms or who like keats! and feeling smart. ;)

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

'What he excelled at was a poetics of negation that insistently vaporizes any endorsement of the way things are. His work is not coded, because a code is a riddle and, like all riddles, it is meant to be solved. A negation—an annulment of the possibility of forgiving anything about the reality we are forced to endure— is meant to linger and deepen. There is no solution to it: it is not a conundrum but the signature of a crisis. Its job is to make crisis available, if only partially, to sensation and thought.'

(from 'To Autumn', p120)

[Leisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impossible to say anything because I want to say everything. An absolutely unreal experience.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

extraordinary

[Juan José · Rating 5 out of 5]

Demasiado bueno. Es excesivamente bueno

[Matthias · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful way to read poetry

[Christopher McCaffery]

“This is a good dream; they all were.”

[Andrin Albrecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anahid Nersessian has quickly become one of my favorite literary scholars, and this book is another evidence as to why: The field of her staggering expertise is English Romantic poetry, a field that way too often appears, if not dry, then nevertheless very white, male, and dusty. The readings that she draws from it tread the line between dazzling and impossibly far-fetched, but somehow she manages to use Shelley and Keats as case studies for thoughts on Marxism and climate change, depression, self-doubt, ambition, activism, and abusive relationships. The language in which she does so is as conversational as it is precise, and, what’s probably most important of all: In every paragraph, you feel just how much she cares about the poems and poets she writes about. There’s none of the fanciful detachment of the intellectual, no distance between the observer in his lab-coat and the specimen under the microscope. Nersessian is a fan, a nerd, a young, hip American who enjoys watching sunsets and getting drunk and editing series of monographs for the University of Chicago Press and prying apart the numerous layers of polysemy in a revised draft of some John Keats poem to help her think about how she will make it through another day. That kind of joy is oh so rare especially on the higher echelons of academia, and yet, it is prime proof of why literary studies continue to be such a crucial discipline …
“Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse” is, then, first and foremost a love-letter to Keats’s poetry written in the form one expects from her, namely a series of more-or-less academic essays. Each of this book’s six essays focuses on one of Keats’s great odes – “to Autumn”, “to Psyche”, “to a Grecian Urn”, “to a Nightingale”, “to Indolence” and “to Melancholy.” Some of them are relatively traditional close-readings (traditional, in Nersessian’s sense, meaning that she stakes highly counter-intuitive political assessments and intertextualities on a few words or even the absence of words, in a way that in the hands of most others would just seem random), whereas others approach the autobiographical: She’ll talk about old flames and new worries, about the discrimination she experienced as a child of immigrants in NYC, and the gendered discrimination later on in college. At its best, those personal streaks are stunning; they highlight the contemporary relevance and ambiguity of someone like Keats (who was very much a lowborn underdog at his time, ridiculed by Byron and scowled at by Wordsworth, but somehow got apotheosized into the whitest and male-est of canons nonetheless) in a way I’ve never experienced before. A handful of times, admittedly, they instead seem like good intentions lacking some rigorous editing: There is one long, ineffectively poetic sequence in particular, in which Nersessian seems to try to interweave Keats’s poetry with an episode of her own feeling stuck and hopelessly drifting in life, presumably in the wake of a relationship fallen to pieces, but this attempt of revealing the profoundly personal is thwarted by her simultaneous instinct to shield other people involved in that episode behind deliberate vagueness, which results in her going on for pages about a thorn in her arm and various people texting her, with the reader hopelessly unaware if that thorn is a metaphor for anything or a literal thorn, which of those people texting correspond to which others, what roles poetry plays in all of that, and if what you’re reading about is a bout of depression so deep that it warrants the lyrical extravaganza Nersessian employs, or rather a comparatively trivial fact of life that her language tries to aggrandize for lack of something with more gravitas …
In conclusion, “Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse” is not quite a perfect book: It handles its academic tradition too hold up solely as a piece of criticism, and is too reluctant in some of its more personal facets to really transcend that tradition. Nevertheless, in some of its essays, it does succeed, and gloriously so: It manages to re-position Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” as one of the most unsettling poems in all of literature, “Ode to Autumn” as one of the most human ones, and “Ode to Psyche” as the one with most hope in store for any reader willing to go looking for that hope. Moreover, it’s daring, which in and of itself warrants heaps of praise; it’s wickedly well written, and it’s not ashamed of being passionate for the poems it engages with. Keep on doing just what you’re doing, Anahid: I’ll preorder the next of your books the way I’ll usually only preorder those of my favorite novelists!

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was initially turned off by the introduction, which was full of self-absorption and platitudes (and I had the same feeling when I read the essay on the "Ode to Melancholy" when Nersessian refers back to her encounter with some guy she was seeing - this second section was just useless). Still, when she was writing about Keats, it was remarkable. This is a fantastic model of the kind of criticism I yearn for but don't often see - personal yet analytical, erudite but not too academic, sometimes even a bit defensive. Nersessian loves Keats and is frustrated by him; she thinks him a genius yet will not overlook his trite moments. It is a model of unflinchingly looking at one's heroes that I hope I can one day internalize.

[Wally Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Keats, born and raised in London, died almost exactly 200 years ago on February 23, 1821; he was twenty-five years old and tuberculosis killed him. He was the son of a London stable-keeper, left school at fifteen to train as an apothecary, and earned his license at age twenty-one. This allowed him to work as a pharmacist, physician, and surgeon, all of which he gave up to write some of the most celebrated poetry in the English language.

Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She attended Yale University as an undergraduate and got her Ph.D in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. After spending three years at Columbia University, she moved to Los Angeles, where she currently teaches in the English Department at UCLA on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. She has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. She also founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press. She is the author of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, and Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse.
She warns readers in the first sentence of Keats’s Odes that “If you’ve never read anything on Keats’s odes before, this book should not be your first stop. It is a collection of essays based on intimate, often idiosyncratic responses to the poems. In fact it is probably better to call them meditations instead of essays.”

I had never read anything on Keats’s odes before, so rather than begin with Nersessian’s thin, exquisite offering, I read Aileen Ward’s John Keats: The Making of the Poet, a sturdy biography that Nersessian calls her favorite. But while a biography can give you facts—Keats was short; his father died when he was eight; his mother remarried almost immediately then disappeared; he couldn’t read Greek; he was in love with a girl named Fanny Brawne; he died in Rome—it cannot explain the origin of or justify the power of the poetry. He astonished his friends with one of his first poems, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, with lines like:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;

Roughly speaking, says Nersessian, odes are “meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional excess or ferment it’s easy for them to tip over into more private preoccupations.” In 1819, Keats wrote six poems that came to be known as the Great Odes: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche, and To Autumn.Because I came to Keats’s odes as a poetry lover but having never read them, I cannot, and will not comment on the quality, insights, or depth of Nersessian’s meditations. Rather I tried to hang on as she takes the reader on a personal and scholarly journey through the poems. In addition to the meditations on the poems, her book includes a useful introduction to Keats and his poetry, a useful bibliography at the end of each meditation, an index, and more.

Which means that readers have not only Nersessian’s exceptionally interesting insights into the odes and personal experiences associated with them, they also have lists of related material (and why it relates to the poems) everything from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Helen Vendler’s The Odes of John Keats, to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

In an interview about the book, Nersessian says that “One of the most impressive things about Keats is that his poetry got so good so fast. He started writing when he was about nineteen, and a lot of his early stuff is pretty terrible. When he died six years later, he had written not one, not two, but a solid handful of the most famous poems in the English language, with lines—'A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ or ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that millions of people have heard somewhere even if they’ve never read them. The explanation, besides raw talent, is that he worked extremely hard at being a poet. As if he knew his days were limited, he wrote all the time, from short little songs to four-thousand-line epics, and he was always upping the ante, trying to make each poem better than the last one and being careful never to repeat himself or fall into old habits. Of course, if he had lived longer, his poetry could have gotten really bad again. Maybe he only had ten or so great poems in him—which is a lot more than most people.”

Keats’s Odes goes a long way to explain why the six are called the Great Odes and why they are still worth reading and discussing. And even if you have never read the Ode on Indolence or the Ode to Psyche, you will be rewarded by Nersessian’s considered thoughts about them. (I.e., Indolence “is a caricature of detachment, a super-satirical striptease. It tries—not very hard—to contemplate the curious in-between of desire and skepticism, a somewhat disreputable zone that will be more familiar to some of us than others.”)

A book to keep, to think about, to reread, to use as a guide to an even deeper appreciation of the poems, and to read once again.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recommended this as a work that deeply marked her and changed her approach as a literary critic. It came up under the context of our discussing styles in academic writing in our fields (English and philosophy). Nersessian writes quite unusually in her field. I’m left with the impression that literary critics probably in general don’t get very precise, detailed, or deep in their claims, but the unique angle into human nature or the world that they can offer is one which proceeds by getting us to viscerally or deeply feel things, which are related to what often matters most to us, beneath the confusion of the everyday. At least if this were the case, Nersessian makes it explicit, and excels particularly well at these aims. She never pretends to be saying anything complicated or deep, uses visceral and vivid language, and makes her points directly.

Here’s an example of this at the beginning, which is representative of how Nersessian writes at large. She compares Keats’s opening to “Ode to a Nightingale,” the expected “O” of any ode, to “a catcall.” She then proceeds to say that, like a catcall, he poem “hurts” you in an “indivisible” ways; you are made self-conscious of your “condition of being an other, a you and not an I.” I like how unorthodox it is to talk about a relatively old poet in the Western canon as giving “catcalls.”

But I wonder whether this adds very much to the basic, self-evident fact that poems have personae or speakers, and whenever we’re spoken to, we’re not the person who does the speaking. At the least, the value of using a term like “catcall” is that it is extremely everyday or colloquial in character, and so is particularly vivid and concrete. This feeling of concreteness at least could get us, as readers, to pay closer attention and to care about the subject matter at hand. While Nersessian doesn’t deliver new insights into the matter at hand, at least we’re now in the posture to potentially figure out more, with these general truths she’s put under catchy slogans stuck in our heads.

This connects to what I mentioned earlier. Maybe the point of literary criticism isn’t to offer new details or facts about the subject matters it talks about; that’s the job of philosophy, psychology, and other more “scientifically-minded” disciplines of the humanities. So this wouldn’t be a shortcoming on Nersessian’s end. But then, I wonder exactly what the value of literary criticism is, other than the obvious effects it has for certain people (e.g., as an avenue to “nerd out” with others about your favorite books; as a practice to pass down ancient knowledge and preserve the cultural tradition of appreciating great artists in the canon; as offering tools for making sense of works of art you could encounter, like what going to a high school class in English can do). What do I learn here about the human condition and the world, which can’t be offered by engaging with art directly, or by engaging with the disciplines of the humanities which aim at detail and progress?

If I think about it, a literary critic I’m still obsessed with, Anne Carson, provides much that can’t be found elsewhere. This is because she, particularly, has her finger on an important truth about human psychology and the structure of experience, which pertains to the possibilities of experience when something is absent, and how that set of possibilities diverges from that which marks experience when something is present. I think a good philosopher could do what she can, but I like reading her on this issue in particular because she isn’t forced into the technical writing style of academic philosophy. Rather, she can write poetically and vividly.

So maybe the point of the literary critic is that, if they have good philosophical or psychological ideas, they can uniquely talk about them in a more rhetorically engaging way. At least given my personal taste, Nersessian just isn’t as good of a philosopher as Carson, and so while she writes very well, there isn’t as much substance to engage with in her work. This sounds reductive, however. I’d like to talk to people who have better experience with literary criticism on this.

It’s possible that as an outsider to the field, I’m ignorant of the importance of what can appear to me as extremely vague or convoluted language to examine literature. Sometimes outsiders to academic philosophy criticize my field for this, but I see that the technical language we use is essential for eliminating ambiguities and making progress. I’d love to hear a case made for this, and to encounter work of literary criticism that can take me there.

As a whole, Nersessian’s work is a fantastic example of someone who can get we contemporary people hopped up with the prospect of finding ancient wisdom in old works. I want to read more Keats now. I’m just skeptical of whether she tells us anything that new about ourselves or the world at the end of the day.

[Wong Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure if any piece of literary criticism has ever left me feeling the way this one did. There are several that have moved me to the point of wanting to pick up the pen to write - anything - or head out for a walk, but this book is its own kind of beautiful and offers its own kind of solace.

It has a unique style - a book that is part literary commentary, part autobiographical reflection. Delving into each ode chapter by chapter, Nersessian's commentary is interspersed with personal anecdotes and fragments from contemporary poets or philosophers that seek to meet the odes at an emotional and intellectual interface. In this way, current issues like sexual assault on campuses, identity politics, and debates about trigger or content warnings are woven into her impassioned and soul-stirring writing on Keats's poems, composed over two centuries ago.

As Nersessian herself admits, her book is not the first piece of writing readers should turn to if they are new to Keats or his odes. Much more is said in other critical works on Keats by way of interpretation and context. But perhaps this book is a kind of trusty companion to those texts, offering a softer way in while getting us to take a hard look at ourselves.

While trying to make sense of the odes myself, I listened to a podcast episode in which Nersessian spoke to host Kamran Javadizadeh about "Ode to Psyche". (side note: Both said it felt like a full circle moment - they have known each other for 20 years and Nersessian was an undergrad when Javadizadeh, a graduate student at the time, delivered a guest lecture on Keats's letters to her Romantic poetry class in college. But it was Nersessian who ended up becoming a Keats scholar.)

I don't know why but I was left in tears when Javadizadeh recited this paragraph from Nersessian's introduction: “The Great Odes record love’s complementary processes of absorption and dissolution. They are, in Keats’s phrase, 'havens of intenseness' where the most unsparing expressions of desire can be at once sheltered and laid bare. Sexually engrossed though never explicit, they make intimacy into a form of endurance, difficult but necessary. This is an erotic sublime in which, as Keats says, we are pressed upon by those to whom we come close, and those to whom we never seem to get close enough. Again and again, trials of longing, needing, having, caring, giving in, breaking down, leaving and failing to leave behind are met with candor and a fearless enthusiasm, for this poetry is honest— not in any limited moral sense, but because it is obstinate in its commitment to loving without shame or reservation. An ode by Keats is just that: an anchorage for big feelings that, in their sheer ungovernability, test what it might be like to be really free. It’s an imperfect approximation, to be sure. Poetry is the art of taking what you can get.”

Including more from the book for good measure:
“Somebody once told me love is the best word to write but also the hardest. Keats uses it all the time, with a kind of originary fervor like he’s Adam naming the animals: this is love, and this is love, and this too, this is also love. I’m more of a stickler, so it’s hard for me to say what I must, that I wrote to understand what was happening to me, and I couldn’t get to the end of it. Although this book is not a memoir but a work of literary criticism, the whole of a particular love is folded inside it.”

“Melancholy, he (Freud) says, reveals the ambivalence built into all erotic relationships, the push-pull pathology of dread and longing, intimidation and tenderness we might as well call an 'economics of pain.' There is a kind of relief in bringing this contrariety into the open, in admitting that, as much as we say we don’t like it, we keep going back for more. It’s a curious feature of love that it convinces us to overvalue what we most resent: the demand that we put up more than we can stand to lose.”

"I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse. I use the word virtue without irony; it could be replaced with tactic. To say that his poetry is a lover’s discourse is to acknowledge that, in love, the line between a strength and a liability can be hard to determine."

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A whole crop of younger literary critics seem to going for the brass ring of the wider audience in recent years, writing for n+1 and NYRB and the New Yorker and the NYT Book Review, such as Merve Emre, Christine Smallwood, and the author of Keats's Odes, Anahid Nersessian. Nersessian has already published a couple of more straightforwardly academic books, but this one seems to be written for a broader (though still well-read) public.

I liked it a lot. I'm not sure I learned much that I did not already know about the six great odes (or the five great odes and Ode on Indolence), but the book had a wise and appealing voice, took some meaningful detours into Nersessian's personal history, and did Keats due honor. I especially liked how Nersessian drew on Roland Barthes in structuring her approach, and I loved how she put Keats into a conversation that included Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Boyer.

I wasn't always persuaded by the claims about the poems. Nersessian dislikes the complacency with which the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn regards the sexual violence depicted on the urn and the fatuousness of equating truth and beauty, and she has reason to dislike them--but why let Keats off the hook with the assertion, "Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that its speaker is not Keats, but a character or persona"? Not Keats? I cannot see why the speaker of Grecian Urn is any more a character or persona than any of the other speakers. I mean...come on.

Nersessian (following Jerome McGann) is a bit more willing to call Keats out for leaving the Peterloo Massacre out of To Autumn. In general, she wishes Keats's poetry manifested more of his awareness of and attraction to radical politics than it does. I get that. But she (and McGann) ought to appreciate more how erratic poetic inspiration is. I can imagine a survivor of Hiroshima, say, a month after the dropping of the bomb, writing a poem about something completely unrelated--the changing of the seasons, even. And why not? Is that a problem? Poets are not editorial writers.

On the other hand--Nersessian's chapter on Ode to Psyche is far and away the best thing I have ever read on that still under-appreciated poem.

Keats's Odes and Joe Moshenska's book on Milton make me think there may be a whole dazzling wave of books by literary scholars that are aimed at the literary-but-not-necessarily-academic readers. As a retired academic who has waded through enough dissertation-ese to satisfy me for this lifetime, I'm ready.

[anh ho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supposedly not an introduction to John Keats’s classic odes, Keats’s Odes serves as a convincing reason to dabble in his enduring works. Anahid Nersessian’s prose is blunt and lucid but intimate and passionate.

Not a poetry fan but I genuinely enjoy reading the accompanied analyses. A relatively quick and straightforward read. It wrestles with the notion of life and death from the perspective of love and Marxism. Keats loves love; he believes in commitment to loving without shame or reservation despite its trials and tribulations. His odes borrow mythology to reflect the history of referencing; Nersessian expands on his references as a critique of the overuse of feminine pain or the “gendered difficulty” in poetry. The analysis also elaborates on the detachment of the soul using Marxism and urges for liberation of our fragility and self-mortification.

“Ode to Nightingale” deals with a posthumous existence, reconciling the beauty and the inevitable death.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” recalls a poetic history of feminine pain and sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it is a “full of shit” ode according to Kenneth Burke.

“Ode to Indolence” offers a satirical caricature of detachment, hinging on Freud’s “the economics of pain” - a curious feature of love that convinces us to overvalue what we most resent; the demand that we put up more than we can stand to lose. Ambivalence comes with certain endurance.

“Ode to Psyche” radiates joy and hope in a world plagued with carnal desires. Based on the Cupid and Psyche’s forbidden love and reciprocal betrayal, Keats accepts the stark reality of love - it’s okay to love knowing its eventual decay.

“To Autumn” is perhaps a commentary on Peterloo massacre, but it is also an insult to natural beauty - specifically its persistence in the midst of extreme and naked horror. On the flip side, the ode confesses to our innate ability to scrounge for beauty regardless of situations.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse by Anahid Nersessian brings nuanced readings of these odes bridging both Keats's time and ours.

While I had read these before, a few of them multiple times, my emphasis as both a student and faculty was primarily prose, so working through them here was a delight for me. I don't think previous readings included much of what Nersessian brings to these readings so I was intrigued to read them again from a different perspective (though admittedly I don't recall much about my previous impressions).

What truly brought these to life and made them (both the odes and the essays) impactful was the manner in which the analysis/engagement brought Keats into the present day as well as into Nersessian's personal life. The open-heartedness with which they are understood and presented allows us to acknowledge problematic aspects while still admitting an attachment (a love) that we might not have been able to do before.

I don't know what interpretations hold sway currently so I can't speak to how these essays compare to other scholarship, but I do know that even a lot of the historical/biographical background is new to me and absolutely helped to support the readings.

While a familiarity with Keats will certainly be a positive for any reader I would stop short of saying that one needs to be intimately familiar with these odes. They are included for us to read and refer to while reading the essays and the essays themselves are wonderfully written and very accessible if one wants to make a small effort. Definitely recommend for those who study or write poetry as well as those like myself who simply enjoy reading and thinking about poetry. This one will get several more readings from me.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Lucía ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I was kindly sent this in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley*

"I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us".

SYNOPSIS:

This is a book about personal essays and analysis of John Keats’ most famous odes. The author analyses Keats’ six famous Odes (the Great Odes) and intertwines it with her own personal experiences and other literary issues.

OPINION:

John Keats is one of my favourite poets ever and I have studied a few of his poems at university, so when I saw an opportunity to learn more about him and his poetry, I went for it. I had read Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale, but the others it was my first time reading, and they were what you would expect of him; Keats has such a beautiful way with words it is almost mesmerizing.

I loved the author’s insight on these odes but not only that. She also explores Ovid’s Metamorphosis (which I also really like) and relates it to the Odes, mentions of philosophers and writers like Freud or Milton, and what gives this book a more original outlook, her own private life. I learned a lot and ended up empathising with the author. She puts more of herself that I originally thought, I expected it to be a little more academic, and less related to her life, but I found out I liked it better this way.

[Dan Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse reminded me of the videogame criticism I grew up on a decade ago. That work by writers like Cara Ellison, Leigh Alexander, Jenn Frank opened up for me a world of critical intimacy with aesthetic objects. Where in the face of a cretinous culture that treated games more like calculators, their words were smart, feminist, and “confessional.” It’s a mode that has fallen out of favor to some extent, for understandable reasons. To bare the soul in publication opens it to commodification, and many women and marginalized writers quickly realize that an audience rubber-necking trauma is not always interested in liberation. Yet, writing that wove textual analysis with associative recollection–with the messy material of real living and “the personal”–was what got me excited about games, about culture, about writing itself. It’s certainly a big part of what politicized me in the years around GamerGate and the murder of Mike Brown. It’s something that I’ve missed since learning harder into literary scholarship and the more stilted norms of academic writing.

Nersessian warns in her Preface that this shouldn’t be anyone’s first book on Keats’s poetry. And maybe that’s true for someone working on literary research, but I don’t think it’s true for the general “book lover” who might make a good reader. Nersessian does a good job of both making the odes approachable and providing original, provocative readings. Her presentation of Keats as someone concerned about love’s entanglements with power, (self-)destruction, and (in)action; as someone obsessed with the world and its flood of beauties and brutalities; as someone with both a complicated life and literary reception, achieves such a felicity of insight without the heaviness of comprehensive detail. Nersessian has a distinct writerly voice that feels at once generous and erudite; some sudden shifts in diction recall the Scholar of Poetry, but one interested in exploring aesthetic objects as a more visceral level than most scholarship allows.

The structure of the book is simple and helpful: an essay for each ode. Nersessian reproduces the ode at the start of a chapter and then provides her reading, perhaps with some historical context of composition, with bits of reception history, with personal anecdotes, with close line reading, with theoretical and philosophical connections. The best essays happen to be about the best odes. So the chapters on “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to Psyche” are quite captivating. The essays on “Ode on Indolence” and “Ode on Melancholy” simply don’t work. In the latter, Nersessian bumps up against the limits of the “confessional” critical essay. She makes a complicated experience with an old lover the kernel of her connection to Keats’s poem, but, for the sake of privacy and discretion (which should be much appreciated), approaches this story with a level of obscurantism that doesn’t work for good criticism. And like the poem “To Autumn,” Nersessian’s chapter on that ode is both beautiful to read and not entirely convincing in terms of its argument. As someone deeply interested in this question of the politics of Keatsian aesthetics, I’m not certain I can be as optimistic as Nersessian about Keats’s supposed affinity with Marxism. I may be sticking with Paul Fry, who sees Keats as a liberal at best, but I know I will be wrestling with Nersessian’s contribution to political considerations of Keats for some time.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse.”

Keats’s Odes a Lover’s Discourse by Anahid Nersessian is an amazing tribute to Keats’s Great Odes. The author does such a fantastic job of making the odes relatable both to Keats’s life and times as well as our own. She also takes the themes of love and loss and personalizes them with stories and feelings from her own life. By the end I felt connected to Keats’s work in a brand new way. I am incredibly impressed with this authors ability to take some of the most beautiful poetry ever written and make the reader feel them on a much deeper level. I will never look at the odes quite the same after having read this and I very highly recommend this read to any fan of Keats. I give it 5 full stars.

[Pim · Rating 3 out of 5]

“What I mean is this. As far as the past is concerned, we exceptionally modern people--the immigrant, the feminist, the communist, the differently desiring -will always be unsub-stantiated, a possibility no one thought to put a frame around.

By contrast there are those in possession of identities, or aspects of identities, that guarantee they will always be included in the tiny circle Wordsworth draws when he defines the poet as "a man speaking to men," even if they would rather not be.

You could describe this state of being unimaginable as a kind of unrequited love but even that implies a relationship, or at least a relation. What I have in mind is a more absolute sense of not mattering.
Ilove Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us -to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse.”