Jenny Farrell

Revolutionary Romanticism Jenny Farrell

Is the poetry of John Keats relevant for us today? In "Revolutionary Romanticism: Examining the Odes of John Keats", Jenny Farrell uncovers core meanings in Keats's poetry that illuminate its contemporary significance. A detailed reading of "Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy" and "To Autumn" presents the poet on his own terms: beauty as the vision of what life could and should be, rooted in actuality but suppressed by society's inhumanity. Thomas Metscher, former professor of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics at the University of Bremen: "The main purpose of literary criticism is the historically contextualized close reading of texts. Such analysis equips readers with the understanding necessary to accessing a text and its author. Jenny Farrell does this expertly here, as in her previous book on Shakespeare's Tragedies. She uncovers, in the texts of the odes, Keats's progressive, humanist and implicitly revolutionary stance and thereby aligns him convincingly with Blake and Shelley as one of the most significant poets of English Romanticism. Farrell combines analytical clarity with emotional empathy, clearing a path into the odes for today's reader, and uncovering the beauty, immediacy and utmost contemporary relevance of 200-year-old texts."