Keats's Odes

Anahid Nersessian is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, and the coeditor of the Thinking Literature series, published by the University of Chicago Press.

• PrefaceIntroduction1   Ode to a Nightingale2   Ode on a Grecian Urn3   Ode on Indolence4   Ode on Melancholy5  Ode to Psyche6  To AutumnPostscript: Sleep and PoetryAcknowledgmentsIndex

"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."--Juliana Spahr "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."--Maureen N. McLane "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.'"--Srikanth Reddy