Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse | Review by Nathan Motulsky

Anahid, Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse. Paperback Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 136pp. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo77573957.html 

In Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian recounts an anecdote in which John Keats, at dinner with friends, covers his mouth and throat with cayenne so as to better relish the cold reprieve of his red wine. One of the most famous and revered poets of the Romantic era, Keats possessed an unbounded desire to feel and describe the textures of the world, a fact all the more poignant given that he lived only twenty-five years, from 1795-1821. Such lines as “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine,” and “‘Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,” brim with sensory excitement. Keats’s ability to capture and serve back to us the most overwhelming if mundane feelings has kept readers returning to him, according to Nersessian, a professor of English at UCLA. From the deadening experience of industrial labor in Keats’s day to our frictionless digital present, Keats reminds us what is easily forgotten: the beauty and terror that can accompany the five senses. “An ode by Keats,” Nersessian writes, is “an anchorage for big feelings that, in their sheer ungovernability, test what it might be like to really be free” (9). 

Each slim chapter in the book is an essay on one of Keats’s six “Great Odes,” but Nersessian tells us that “it is probably better to call them meditations instead of essays” (xi). Her mood ranges from accessible erudition like that of James Wood’s seminal How Fiction Works to tantalizing autocriticism that occludes as much as it reveals. “Honestly I’m not trying to be coy, just decent, since this is not only my story to tell,” she writes (87).  The first and last chapters, on “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn” respectively, constitute more conventional literary scholarship, oriented toward “non-specialists” (xi). There, she demonstrates how the formal features of the poems reflect and amplify their meaning. For instance, the first words in “Ode to a Nightingale”---“My heart aches”---already derails the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, mimicking the aching heart. The remaining chapters deploy a dazzling range of methodologies, including memoir, historicization, comparative studies with distant writers and thinkers, and close reading. Nersessian’s autobiographical element, in particular, is an elusive but potent element of the book. The middle three chapters tell the story of a relationship coming undone, but when, what, or who this relationship represents remains obscure. Reflecting on the book as a whole, she writes, “It is, as I’ve said, a love story, but like everything else in this book it is also about the forming of the five senses in this place, at this time, about what is happening to us now that we have collectively reached yet another set of prospects to call unendurable” (19). In telling this story by way of reading Keats, she’s far more interested in exploring how and why a body feels when confronted with a profound aesthetic experience than she is in exposing private information.

One of Nersessian’s most elucidating close-readings comes in chapter two, on “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is, Nersessian writes, “to put it bluntly, a poem about sexual violence” (44). The poem is ekphrastic, verbally describing an art object, and the artwork here is an imagined ancient Grecian urn with painted scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Nersessian’s point is emphatically not that Ovid and Keats should not be taught, but rather that there are wrong ways of teaching them. She cites a 2015 op-ed that describes a professor’s approach to teaching the certain myths in the Metamorphoses that contain vivid descriptions of rape by focusing on “the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery” (48). As a result, a student who had been a survivor of sexual assault disengaged from the discussion and “did not feel safe” (48). When she approached the professor after class, the professor dismissed her concerns. “As a lover of Ovid,” Nersessian writes, “I find this account appalling” (49). True, she notes, the Metamorphoses “is a very beautiful poem with many splendid images” (49). But what makes it a significant work is “Ovid’s head-on confrontation with the question of how aesthetic beauty coexists with or even depends upon violence .… If you miss that, you’ve missed the poem completely” (49). The stakes of teaching and interpreting poetry, in other words, are enormous. If we recognize ourselves and our culture through and with poetry, then students must have the right to contest and define its meaning.

By a similar token, Nersessian argues that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” “is a poem about poetry’s long involvement in a cultural tradition that takes sexual violence to be an especially rich source of inspiration for art” (44). Her advisedly “controversial” opinion (“but I’m taking it anyway”) is that, unlike all the other odes, the speaker of this ode is not Keats himself but a character—an aggressive, overweening, male character (43). From the first line, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the speaker displays his menace. She points out that no other ode begins with “thou,” a word that both sounds like an accusation and rhymes with a yelp of pain. The phrase “unravish’d bride,” moreover, anticipates sexual domination. Nersessian imagines the speaker walking around the urn, asking rhetorical questions to his imagined audience and not understanding their violent implications: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” (41). To blithely ask these questions rhetorically in the face of a rape scene, to deploy elevated diction in order to aestheticize the atrocious, is for the speaker to display a particular kind of chauvinism.

Of course, Keats’s poem does not endorse its speaker’s position, and Nersessian shows the subtle ways Keats undermines him. In stanza three, for instance, Keats places such “syrupy phrases” as “Ah, happy, happy boughs” and “more happy, happy love!” near words that evoke their effects: “‘cloy’d’ (stuffed, nauseated) or even poisoned (‘burning forehead,’ ‘parching tongue’)” (51). In the end, Keats leaves it to us, his readers, to criticize rather than to follow this speaker’s lead. 

The tension between beauty and ethics becomes even more fraught in “To Autumn,” which the last chapter considers. Nersessian’s thesis: “‘To Autumn’ is perfect and unforgivable” (114). Perfect, because it needs no adjustments of syllables or images, and it demands no action from the reader. Unforgivable, because Keats wrote this poem just one month after the Peterloo Massacre, which many considered “the loudest if not the first shot in an intensifying class war” in England, rousing poets and thinkers to respond and to act (118). The massacre took place at a demonstration on August 16, 1819, in Manchester, where some sixty thousand unarmed, working-class protestors had gathered to call for increased enfranchisement in Parliament in the wake of devastating economic conditions since the Napoleonic wars. By the early afternoon, “a volunteer regiment of landowners and merchants” charged the crowd, trampling men, women, and young children, “slashing indiscriminately,” leaving approximately fifteen dead and over 600 wounded (115-6). Despite his leftist politics, “Peterloo does not appear to have stopped Keats’s world on its axis”---a rather uncomfortable fact for Keats lovers (117).

Might “To Autumn” be a clandestine political treatise, though? Despite scholars’ noble attempts to argue precisely that, Nersessian claims that Keats is doing something more interesting and even more subversive. The perfect form of “To Autumn” attests to the inconvenient fact of the unrelenting presence of beauty in a monstrous world: “It is there and true even in an avalanche of shit and despair…That we can be here—on this planet, in this time, confined by these exact habits of survival—and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do. ‘To Autumn’ confesses it for us” (122). Nersessian uses the collective “we,” but the sentiment of being unable to stop loving something or someone rhymes with her announcement in the Introduction that the book is “about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it,” reminding us that the personal always lurks within the critical (2). By engaging personal affective experience in a reflection about the impersonal violence of the world, Nersessian exemplifies why the humanities are surging with exciting new styles and genres of analysis even amidst much hand-wringing about their decline. Poetry, art, and criticism embolden the individual to perform the dual tasks of both celebrating beauty while striving for more just conditions. “There was nothing Keats loved more than us,” Nersessian writes, “those who know this is not all we are meant to be” (1).

To read Nersessian read Keats is an energizing study in the sheer range of moods, contexts, and judgments a critic can bring to her objects of analysis. In her chapter on “Ode to a Nightingale,” Nersessian writes that “the good reader gives the text back to itself in a slightly altered and expanded form” (38). In this way, we might consider good reading as anti-social, in the same way she considers “dejection,” or what today we would call depression, in Keats anti-social. The anti-social tendency of dejection is not a pejorative but, rather, “probably its best quality, if we understand anti-social to mean committed to refusing things as they are” (35). Persistently in tension between extolling beauty and gazing toward new political horizons, Keats’s Odes offers a succinct, virtuoso demonstration of reading itself as a practice of sensing and expanding plausible but not-yet-realized conditions of ourselves.

Nathan Motulsky, Columbia University