Vendler’s study of the odes is as sympathetic, as fundamentally Keatsian, as it is persuasive. It contains the fullest and most searching expansion of these six poems…that has yet appeared.—John Bayley, Times Literary Supplement

[Vendler] is often described as the best living American ‘close reader’ of poetry, and rumors of a forthcoming book on Keats have aroused expectations of pleasure such as are not always to be detected when a professor announces a book on a poet. She has met this new challenge with her usual admirable vigor and confidence…She is a virtuoso.—Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

Helen Vendler’s readings of Keats’s major poems are simply superb.—Nation

[A] scrupulous and sensitive exploration of Keats’ odes…Treating the odes as a unit is not new, but Vendler uses them with new-minted relevance to reveal the development of Keats’ creative mind. She is our finest close reader of poetry, and page after page brims with the excitement of the poet’s intellectual and artistic discoveries…When you finish this book, you don’t reach an end; you understand why Keats made or did not make the choices he did; and you are compelled to go back and reconsider these complex relationships, both in the criticism and the odes…The prose brilliantly illumines the mind and art of Keats.—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

Every rift of [Vendler’s] book is loaded with critical ore, stimulating ideas of all sorts, and throwing off suggestions that join up with others already in the mind. To do justice to her book a commentary on it would have to be as long as itself, for every point she makes on Keats’s lines are, like the lines themselves, both solution and problem.—John Bayley, Studies in Romanticism