Keats’s Odes
A Lover’s Discourse
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Keats’s Odes
A Lover’s Discourse
“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.
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.
160 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2021
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
Excerpt
In the thick of a colossal heartbreak or else teetering on the lip of one, I went to see a witch. Someone had brandished forgiveness in front of me like baby Keats’s sword, and I wanted to know how to answer. The question, I could tell, bored her. Frankly it bored me, and we had bigger fish to fry. One of the first things she said was, “you spend a lot of time with dead
people.”
I had never thought of it that way, but she’s exactly right. I told her that, yes, I think about dead people all day. I read what they’ve written and try to understand what they’ve meant; then I stand in front of teenagers and offer up intimate details about their lives—their exercise routines and puerperal fevers, the children and ideals they tried to hold onto and those they cast aside. I explain how close they came to imagining communism, mostly as an excuse to drill into my students what communism is (“the land belongs to no one” and “the fruits belong
to all”—Sylvain Maréchal, 1796). If I’m being completely honest, I do feel sometimes that they are in the room with me, and I tell the witch that lately one of them has a presence that feels very angry, as if he has taken a side in the matter of the heartbreak, and it is not mine. The witch is skeptical. “I don’t know what to tell you about that,” she says, “but you need to be more careful with spirits.”
Keats, too, spent a lot of time with dead people, as a medical student dissecting cadavers and, like me, in his head. He had a feeling he was being watched—by
Shakespeare. To Haydon he copped to having “notions of a good Genius presiding over” him, then asked, with his usual blend of diffidence and bravado, “Is it too Daring to Fancy Shakespeare this Presider?” If I’ve had similar notions of Keats, I have no idea why he might preside over me. I’ve never had literary ambitions. In college the only people who called themselves poets were wealthy, freckled New Englanders who dressed as puns for Halloween. I threw in my lot with the art majors, soft-spoken lefties, and kids in bands, was stoned all day and spent weekend mornings in a friend’s attic room, where we tried to wrap our heads around Althusser and Fanon. There was a group of us who identified, though we’d never say so out loud, as critics: people who know what words mean. To this day I don’t like being called a writer, even in the indirect context of a compliment like “You’re a good writer.” I don’t like the compliment either; in grad school I learned that good writer was a synonym for con artist.
If Keats is presiding over me, I guess he has his reasons; he’s been doing it for a long time. One day, when I must have been around eleven, I pulled a book called Love’s Aspects down from my parents’ shelf. Edited by Jean Garrigue, it promised to be a collection of the world’s great love poems, but inside were also Keats’s letters to Brawne—not poems at all but, in their naked sense of direction, irreducibly epistolary documents. Once I learned what happened to these two young people, I felt personally cheated by the tragedy. I wanted more of them both, including or maybe especially Brawne, whose voice is almost absent from the historical record. I promptly read all the Keats I could, including the great mid-century biographies—by Aileen Ward, Robert Gittings, Bate—and from here it was an easy glide to Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, even Wordsworth, the awful man who had insulted Keats at a dinner party by calling Endymion “a very pretty piece of Paganism.”
It’s hard to overstate what a lifeline this literature, which I didn’t yet know to call the Western canon, was for me, or how unambivalent about it I was. My father was born and raised in Tehran, and my mother, whose family is Welsh, in a depressed former mining town that used to be called Lake City, Tennessee, site of the Coal Creek War and a stone’s throw from the Fraterville Mine Disaster. Eastern Armenian, with its chic cargo of loan words from Farsi and French, was the first language I spoke and the whole of my identity—with a name as conspicuous as mine, I didn’t have much choice—but in the 1980s and ’90s, spun on a loop of hostage crises, arms deals, burning flags and burning oil fields, commercial airplanes shot out of the sky, it was the Iranian bit that caused the most trouble.
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 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 the 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. Besides, being “good at it” was praised and rewarded. When I got in trouble, which was often, it was the English teachers who had my back.
people.”
I had never thought of it that way, but she’s exactly right. I told her that, yes, I think about dead people all day. I read what they’ve written and try to understand what they’ve meant; then I stand in front of teenagers and offer up intimate details about their lives—their exercise routines and puerperal fevers, the children and ideals they tried to hold onto and those they cast aside. I explain how close they came to imagining communism, mostly as an excuse to drill into my students what communism is (“the land belongs to no one” and “the fruits belong
to all”—Sylvain Maréchal, 1796). If I’m being completely honest, I do feel sometimes that they are in the room with me, and I tell the witch that lately one of them has a presence that feels very angry, as if he has taken a side in the matter of the heartbreak, and it is not mine. The witch is skeptical. “I don’t know what to tell you about that,” she says, “but you need to be more careful with spirits.”
Keats, too, spent a lot of time with dead people, as a medical student dissecting cadavers and, like me, in his head. He had a feeling he was being watched—by
Shakespeare. To Haydon he copped to having “notions of a good Genius presiding over” him, then asked, with his usual blend of diffidence and bravado, “Is it too Daring to Fancy Shakespeare this Presider?” If I’ve had similar notions of Keats, I have no idea why he might preside over me. I’ve never had literary ambitions. In college the only people who called themselves poets were wealthy, freckled New Englanders who dressed as puns for Halloween. I threw in my lot with the art majors, soft-spoken lefties, and kids in bands, was stoned all day and spent weekend mornings in a friend’s attic room, where we tried to wrap our heads around Althusser and Fanon. There was a group of us who identified, though we’d never say so out loud, as critics: people who know what words mean. To this day I don’t like being called a writer, even in the indirect context of a compliment like “You’re a good writer.” I don’t like the compliment either; in grad school I learned that good writer was a synonym for con artist.
If Keats is presiding over me, I guess he has his reasons; he’s been doing it for a long time. One day, when I must have been around eleven, I pulled a book called Love’s Aspects down from my parents’ shelf. Edited by Jean Garrigue, it promised to be a collection of the world’s great love poems, but inside were also Keats’s letters to Brawne—not poems at all but, in their naked sense of direction, irreducibly epistolary documents. Once I learned what happened to these two young people, I felt personally cheated by the tragedy. I wanted more of them both, including or maybe especially Brawne, whose voice is almost absent from the historical record. I promptly read all the Keats I could, including the great mid-century biographies—by Aileen Ward, Robert Gittings, Bate—and from here it was an easy glide to Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, even Wordsworth, the awful man who had insulted Keats at a dinner party by calling Endymion “a very pretty piece of Paganism.”
It’s hard to overstate what a lifeline this literature, which I didn’t yet know to call the Western canon, was for me, or how unambivalent about it I was. My father was born and raised in Tehran, and my mother, whose family is Welsh, in a depressed former mining town that used to be called Lake City, Tennessee, site of the Coal Creek War and a stone’s throw from the Fraterville Mine Disaster. Eastern Armenian, with its chic cargo of loan words from Farsi and French, was the first language I spoke and the whole of my identity—with a name as conspicuous as mine, I didn’t have much choice—but in the 1980s and ’90s, spun on a loop of hostage crises, arms deals, burning flags and burning oil fields, commercial airplanes shot out of the sky, it was the Iranian bit that caused the most trouble.
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 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 the 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. Besides, being “good at it” was praised and rewarded. When I got in trouble, which was often, it was the English teachers who had my back.