Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

"Anahid Nersessian gathers Keats's six Great Odes and comments on them in essays at once bold, speculative, and personal. There are many lovers in this 'lover's discourse,' but the main ones are Keats and Nersessian herself. Each ode emerges here as an expression and an inducement of love--sometimes for humanity in general, sometimes for a specific person. This is literary criticism as passion work, close reading as intimacy, with memoir occasionally breaking to the surface with hints of heartbreak and an absent lover. For many younger readers today, it is difficult to love canonical literature when, like Nersessian herself, one belongs to ethnic and sexual categories that were historically excluded from its purview. Yet every year, students and other readers fall hard for Keats, despite lives so distant from the world of the English Regency. There is what one critic long ago called a 'lovableness' to this poet who died of tuberculosis on 23 February 1821, at age 25, exiled in rooms beside the Spanish Steps in Rome. Nersessian shows why we love him still, and why his odes continue to speak powerfully to our own desires."