Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together-that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.

Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry-thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural-are brought to bear on it at once.

About the Author
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Reviews
Vendler's study of the odes is as sympathetic, as fundamentally Keatsian, as it is persuasive. It contains the fullest and most searching expansion of these six poems...that has yet appeared. -- John Bayley * Times Literary Supplement *
[Vendler] is often described as the best living American 'close reader' of poetry, and rumors of a forthcoming book on Keats have aroused expectations of pleasure such as are not always to be detected when a professor announces a book on a poet. She has met this new challenge with her usual admirable vigor and confidence... She is a virtuoso. -- Frank Kermode * New York Times Book Review *
Helen Vendler's readings of Keats's major poems are simply superb. * Nation *
[A] scrupulous and sensitive exploration of Keats' odes... Treating the odes as a unit is not new, but Vendler uses them with new-minted relevance to reveal the development of Keats' creative mind. She is our finest close reader of poetry, and page after page brims with the excitement of the poet's intellectual and artistic discoveries... When you finish this book, you don't reach an end; you understand why Keats made or did not make the choices he did; and you are compelled to go back and reconsider these complex relationships, both in the criticism and the odes... The prose brilliantly illumines the mind and art of Keats. -- Robert Taylor * Boston Globe *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674630765
Author Helen Vendler
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint The Belknap Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 454g