Keats's Odes
A Lover's Discourse
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“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 story: 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Intense emotion abounds in this literary blend of analysis and autobiography from UCLA English professor Nersessian (Utopia, Limited). In six essays that examine each of Keats's Great Odes, Nersessian tells a "kind of love story" between herself and the poems, and reads Keats's work as radical (while he frequented leftist circles, she writes, his radicalism lies "in his style"). In "Ode to a Nightingale," she describes Keats's "persistence of beauty within the ugliest situations," and in "To Autumn" discusses what inspired the poem. Only two of the essays include extended first-person narration ("The autobiographical dimension will not always be obvious," Nersessian warns in the introduction): "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which Nersessian powerfully recounts her experience with sexual harassment as a student, and "Ode on Melancholy," in which she asks, "What kind of woman am I?" While Nersessian aims for her study to appeal to nonspecialists, that goal is undermined by ample use of literary jargon (apotheosis, ekphrasis, and caesuras), and discussions of poetic meter that will leave lay readers behind. This astute work will be best enjoyed by academics or Keats enthusiasts.
