HAVING JUST READ Edmund Wilson's 1950s journals, I wondered whether he could be considered the last great American literary critic who did not have a secure academic position (although he did have a few prestigious-visitor sorts of positions). I couldn't think of another one from the last four or five decades.
There have been some university-based literary critics who made significant efforts to write for broader, culturally literate but not scholarly audiences. Lionel Trilling, for instance. Harold Bloom was trying to do that in his books on the western canon and on Shakespeare, but both those books feel eccentric and polemical compared to Wilson's Patriotic Gore. There's Camille Paglia, while we are on the subject of the eccentric and polemical. Stephen Greenblatt made some headway with the larger public in the Shakespeare biography and The Swerve.
A whole crop of younger literary critics seem to going for the brass ring of the wider audience in recent years, writing for n+1 and NYRB and the New Yorker and the NYT Book Review, such as Merve Emre, Christine Smallwood, and the author of Keats's Odes, Anahid Nersessian. Nersessian has already published a couple of more straightforwardly academic books, but this one seems to be written for a broader (though still well-read) public.
I liked it a lot. I'm not sure I learned much that I did not already know about the six great odes (or the five great odes and Ode on Indolence), but the book had a wise and appealing voice, took some meaningful detours into Nersessian's personal history, and did Keats due honor. I especially liked how Nersessian drew on Roland Barthes in structuring her approach, and I loved how she put Keats into a conversation that included Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Boyer.
I wasn't always persuaded by the claims about the poems. Nersessian dislikes the complacency with which the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn regards the sexual violence depicted on the urn and the fatuousness of equating truth and beauty, and she has reason to dislike them--but why let Keats off the hook with the assertion, "Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that its speaker is not Keats, but a character or persona"? Not Keats? I cannot see why the speaker of Grecian Urn is any more a character or persona than any of the other speakers. I mean...come on.
Nersessian (following Jerome McGann) is a bit more willing to call Keats out for leaving the Peterloo Massacre out of To Autumn. In general, she wishes Keats's poetry manifested more of his awareness of and attraction to radical politics than it does. I get that. But she (and McGann) ought to appreciate more how erratic poetic inspiration is. I can imagine a survivor of Hiroshima, say, a month after the dropping of the bomb, writing a poem about something completely unrelated--the changing of the seasons, even. And why not? Is that a problem? Poets are not editorial writers.
On the other hand--Nersessian's chapter on Ode to Psyche is far and away the best thing I have ever read on that still under-appreciated poem.
Keats's Odes and Joe Moshenska's book on Milton make me think there may be a whole dazzling wave of books by literary scholars that are aimed at the literary-but-not-necessarily-academic readers. As a retired academic who has waded through enough dissertation-ese to satisfy me for this lifetime, I'm ready.
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