A book to read, reread, and read once again

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.