Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism

Book excerpt: James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present. This study does much to illuminate what Keats's most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.