The Odes of John Keats

“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 emb...