I have had what I have been privately referring to as a poetry block for several years: I can barely read it, I certainly can’t write it, and it’s difficult to properly read anything about it. I used to live for poetry, and I still make a living by, occasionally, teaching it. It’s a strange feeling, not necessarily unfamiliar to me, but unusually located: to feel about an entire form the way I have felt so often in the past about crushes, romantic or sexual entanglements, and even relationships. I was too close to it, and then I couldn’t stand it; it reminded me of a strength of feeling I could no longer access, and so I wanted it out of my sight. Reading Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, in this context, was like meeting someone new after a long period of dormancy: a giddy feeling of connection, a reawakening of certain possibilities.

Admittedly, my own relationship to poetry is atypical: for many, the genre is a source of indifference or embarrassment. Those who write it often feel compelled to adopt a defensive tone to counter the assumption that it is both excessive and embarrassing. Poetry is associated with the teenager: Ben Lerner, writing in The Hatred of Poetry in 2016: “If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now.”

One of the most enduring icons of this teenage refusal to be numbed to the world is surely John Keats, the Romantic poet born in London in 1795 and dead of tuberculosis by the age of twenty-five. He is immortalized, in popular memory at least, as a delicate, sensitive character who never quite grew up: his contemporaries like William Wordsworth declared his work to be “unhealthy,” or, like Lord Byron, made fun of his verse as “mental masturbation” (“John’s piss-a-bed poetry” was another of Byron’s monikers).