Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Stirring Shades and Baffled Beams: The Ode on Indolence 2. Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Psyche 3. Wild Warblings from the Aeolian Lyre: The Ode to a Nightingale 4. Truth the Best Music: The Ode on a Grecian Urn 5. The Strenuous Tongue: The Ode on Melancholy 6. The Dark Secret Chambers: The Fall of Hyperion 7. Peaceful Sway above Man's Harvesting: To Autumn Conclusion Notes Index

About the Author

Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur 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.
*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.
*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.
*Boston Globe*