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.
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