Keats's Odes Quotes

“I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us”
― Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

“Every impeccable turn of every line is bought by shame, which can never be allowed to leech through the language it has hounded into being, lest it accidentally impersonate an alibi or a justification. That we can be here— on this planet, in this time, confined by these exact habits of survival— and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do. 'To Autumn' confesses it for us.”
― Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

“Somebody once told me love is the best word to write but also the hardest. Keats uses it all the time, with a kind of originary fervor like he’s Adam naming the animals: this is love, and this is love, and this too, this is also love. I’m more of a sticker, so it’s hard for me to say what I must, that I wrote to understand what was happening to me, and I couldn’t get to the end of it. Although this book is not a memoir but a work of literary criticism, the whole of a particular love is folded inside it.”
― Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

“Melancholy, he (Freud) says, reveals the ambivalence built into all erotic relationships, the push-pull pathology of dread and longing, intimidation and tenderness we might as well call an 'economics of pain.' There is a kind of relief in bringing this contrariety into the open, in admitting that, as much as we say we don’t like it, we keep going back for more. It’s a curious feature of love that it convinces us to overvalue what we most resent: the demand that we put up more than we can stand to lose.”
― Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

“It is unreasonable to be asked no to breathe. But it is miraculous to breathe for another.”
― Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse