Keats’s Odes
A Lover’s Discourse
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Ode to a Nightingale
2 Ode on a Grecian Urn
3 Ode on Indolence
4 Ode on Melancholy
5 Ode to Psyche
6 To Autumn
Postscript: Sleep and Poetry
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
1 Ode to a Nightingale
2 Ode on a Grecian Urn
3 Ode on Indolence
4 Ode on Melancholy
5 Ode to Psyche
6 To Autumn
Postscript: Sleep and Poetry
Acknowledgments
Index
Review Quotes
Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Keats's Odes] appears freed by the sensuousness of Keats’s own verse, standing on the verge of becoming something more than literary criticism. While not an imitation of Keatsian style, Nersessian shares his willingness for vulnerability and for writing that enfleshes the experience of being subject to the world because you are a subject in it."
Maureen N. McLane
“This is an intense, often dazzling, original, illuminating, idiosyncratic, but also welcoming and welcome book. Offering trenchant, astute, often polemical and sometimes breathtaking readings of Keats’s Odes—and simultaneously of love, politics, worldmaking, and self—Nersessian has written a propelled, impelled, impassioned work, truly in Keats’s spirit.”
Juliana Spahr
“This book claims to be ‘about’ Keats’s odes. And it is. But it is also about beauty and sadness and love and revolution and how the odes can help us to better understand these things. It is nothing short of a perfect book, one that understands how poetry can transform one’s life. Nersessian is on track to be the Harold Bloom of her generation, but a Bloom with politics.”
Srikanth Reddy
“In a tour-de-force series of revisionary readings, Nersessian makes Keats’s odes new in A Lover’s Discourse; and by the end of this exhilarating book, a new poet emerges into historical and psychological focus as well, neither aesthete nor insurgent, but someone who discovers the radicalism immanent in literary style. On yet another level, Keats’s Odes is a discourse on love as interpretive practice. Demanding, generous, precise, utopian, and unfailingly brilliant, Nersessian reinvents reading itself as a form of critical intimacy for our broken times. ‘If love is anything not laid waste by this world it is free,’ writes this reader. ‘Mine is.’”
Publishers Weekly
"Intense emotion abounds in this literary blend of analysis and autobiography. . . . In six essays that examine each of Keats’s Great Odes, Nersessian tells a 'kind of love story' between herself and the poems."
Allen Michie | Arts Fuse
"Nersessian’s knack for tapping into the emotional center of the odes comes from the third part of her book’s approach: including a personal narrative. She isn’t afraid of bringing her educated, loving, and damaged self (or at least the persona of one) into the discussion.”
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Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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