Anahid Nersessian on John Keats ("Ode to Psyche")

Close Readings: Episode 2

For the second episode of Close Readings, I talked with Anahid Nersessian about her favorite poem, John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche.” Anahid is an old friend and a brilliant critic, and Keats is one of my first loves—this conversation was special. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

We refer, in the course of our conversation, to Anahid’s latest book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (Chicago 2021), which is now available in a new edition from Verso. It’s an unforgettable work of criticism: its essays offer new readings of the six “great odes,” interwoven with an occluded kind of memoir and critical autobiography. In our conversation, Anahid tells me: “One of the things I wanted the book to do was to imagine a way to write intimate experience that wasn’t driven by the desire to merely recount fact but rather to figure in language various kinds of psychological intensities and difficulties.”

And so maybe here again, as in our first episode, we have a critic taking a lesson from their poet. For just as Anahid has sought a mode that allows for “intimate self-disclosure” without giving up its claims to self-effacing critical intelligence, the Keats whom Anahid describes in our conversation is himself a deeply ambivalent poet, divided between something like those tendencies:

In his own life, Keats tacks pretty dramatically between wanting desperately to leave a mark—there’s a very famous statement in one of his letters where he says, with the great confidence of youth, “I think I shall be among the English poets when I die” […]—and, on the other hand, particularly in the letters to [Fanny] Brawne, you see this obsessive recurrence to the scene of self-dissolution. That would have been a very, very powerful fantasy for him, the idea of being so completely absorbed in another being that he himself would evaporate.

One of the things that makes “Ode to Psyche” so appealing to Anahid is the way it resolves this ambivalence: “In the poem, that is turned into this highly positive ideal that has no cynical or pathological valence to it whatsoever and in fact, if anything, is stood against the whole idea of pathologizing love or pathologizing intimacy or pathologizing desire.” Life, sometimes, gives us more than we can take. But “poetry,” writes Anahid, “is the art of taking what you can get” (9).

Anahid Nersessian is a professor of English at UCLA and the author of two earlier books: Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard: 2015), and The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: 2020). She has published in a wide variety of academic journals and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

If you’re enjoying Close Readings, please make sure you’re following it on your favorite podcast app, and do consider rating it and leaving a review. Share it with your friends! Once again, you can find my conversation with Anahid on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. I hope you can tell that I’m really enjoying these conversations; I’ll keep telling you about them here.