The Odes of John Keats

Helen Vendler

    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

    [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

    Helen Vendler's readings of Keats's major poems are simply superb.
       --Nation

  • Cover: The Odes of John Keats
  • A photo of the author

Photo of Helen Vendler: Mary Lee

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.