What’s a poem of Keats like? If Milton’s Paradise Lost is a cathedral, Keats’s sonnets are dewy bowers to spend the warm moon under. If reading Shakespeare’s plays are like walking into a spring carnival full of amusements and every manner of person, reading a Keats ode is like walking into a thatched-roofed hermitage decorated with a cottage-core, maximalist aesthetic.
He is like no other Romantic poet. Where Coleridge gives us spiritual crisis, Keats gives us syncretic enthusiasm; where Wordsworth gives us passion tranquilized, Keats fans passion into flame on a trimmed wick; where Shelley gives us prophetic strains that rise above the din of political tumult, Keats casts intoxicating spells like a priest of nature tending to secret rites; where Byron makes Pope’s correctness soar on new wings, Keats transcends his sorrows with flights of longing and fancy.
Here are the readings and meeting times. The Book Club is available to everyone in the Sponsor-Student tier. More info to come in the following month. I’m looking forward to this!
June 3: “Ode to Psyche” and the sonnet “To Spenser”
June 10: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
June 17: “Ode on Melancholy” and the sonnet “The day is gone, and all its sweetness gone”
June 24: “Ode to Indolence” and the sonnet “To Sleep”
