Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Odes of John Keats

The Odes of John Keats

Vendler, Helen

Paperback

Series: Belknap Press

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0674630769
ISBN13: 9780674630765
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Mar 15 1985
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.95 Width: 5.89 Depth: 8.95
Language: English

Simply superb.
--Nation

A landmark study reconstructs the magnificent architecture of Keats's odes beam by beam.

With the exception of Shakespeare, John Keats has garnered more critical attention than probably any other English poet, above all for his six great odes. Composed in the span of just a few months in 1819, the odes mark the high point of Keats's all-too-short literary career, forming, as Helen Vendler puts it, the group of works in which the English language finds an ultimate embodiment.

Even with the mountain of criticism that precedes it, The Odes of John Keats nonetheless accomplishes something bracingly new: it reveals that the odes, typically read separately, demand to be read as a unified whole. Only when we read them together, Vendler argues, do we see how each ode builds upon, and contradicts, the one that came before it--a progression that expresses Keats's sustained and deliberate inquiry into nature of creativity itself. From fruitless revery in Ode on Indolence, to successive explorations of music and mimetic art in Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, to the final triumph of lyric poetry in To Autumn, each ode advances tentative theses about the relationship between truth, beauty, and sensory experience, only to subsequently overturn them from a higher vantage point.

Exquisitely attentive to the warp and weft of Keats's many languages, from Greek mythology to eighteenth-century allegory, Vendler's architectonic reading masterfully achieves criticism's highest aim: keeping these classic poems, to borrow Keats's own words, forever warm and still to be enjoy'd.

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