Anahid Nersessian is a literary critic and Professor of English at UCLA. She has written about literature, art, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, and is the author of three books, most recently an experimental work of criticism, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (Verso, 2022). In this interview, Nersessian speaks to poet Ed Luker about poetry, authoritarian personalities, and heartbreak.

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ED LUKER: On first reading your book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, I was in awe at your love of Keats. He was my first love, in a way. I would read him perched against a tree at lunchtime as a teenager studying for my A Levels. What first made me fall in love with the work was the music of the phrase: “silver, snarling trumpets” or “beaded bubbles winking at the brim.” I became obsessed with the movement in these small phrases. What was it for you?

ANAHID NERSESSIAN: Keats was the first writer that I really loved, too. That's partly because I came to his poetry through the love letters to Fanny Brawne. I read them in a book about love poetry my dad had in his office. They are obviously designed to seduce anyone who reads them. I’m always shocked (and this is a naive thing to say) when people read Keats’s letters and experience them as misogynistic or hostile. They are often those things. But I also think, well, that's their humanity, that's also being 20 years old. And I love that they’re vulnerable, paranoid, and cruel – you absolutely get a full human being on the page in those letters.

When you really fall in love, you fall in love with the personality and the strangeness of the language. There’s the one letter where he says “you’ve absorbed me.” Once you’ve read that line, you can’t think about being in love in any other way. A lot of Keats’s poetry works in that way. It reintroduces experience to you. You might never have thought, in language: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” before you’ve read his poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. But as soon as the language is given to you, suddenly you realise it’s an experience of a thought you’ve had over and over again. That sense of relentless enlargement of what it’s possible to think and what it’s possible to feel, it seems to be particular to all great poetry – but especially to Keats. Then there’s the tragedy of his personal story, which is very moving, especially when you’re 16.

EL: Writing about translating a poem by Simone Weil, the poet Lisa Robertson has written: “the act of reading the poem became the seal of an active spiritual consent to love.” What for you is the relationship between reading poetry and loving? Did writing this book and Keats feel like being in a relationship? What kind of relationship?

AN: It felt like being out of a relationship, because as you no doubt know, from reading the book, in part it’s a sort of love story. But it's also a story about a relationship that fell apart. I don’t want to say that it was an act of mourning because nothing about the book feels elegiac. But it was very painful to write. Having the critical frame made processing all the other difficulties more bearable.

EL: Reading the book a second time, I became increasingly aware that there were times where it felt like you were really giving Keats the generosity of your understanding in relation to gender and your own experiences that you’re processing in the book. And there were other times where you were withdrawing or withholding that generosity.

AN: That’s true. Especially in the chapter on ‘Ode on Melancholy’. Sometimes you just get fed up with people, right? You get fed up with their limitations. And when you do, it’s very hard to pretend. With Keats, you have a poet who’s capable of such magnanimity of the imagination and of seeing things as they are. In his letters he writes about how he knows that women are his equals, but it’s very hard to square that with his fantasy that they’re all goddesses. That he was capable of that degree of self-knowledge, but then also capable of writing a poem like ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which is shallow and snide, as I reader, I felt frustrated, because you know that a person has more in them than that, you know? In my book there are these moments of irritability or irritation at Keats, and I hadn't thought of that necessarily, as part of the purgative process of working through the aftermath of this relationship that I also write about – maybe that is a good way to think about it.

EL: The poet Momtaza Mehri has written that when she discovered that Keats quit his medical career “in this painful bind between familial expectation and creative fulfilment,” as an immigrant’s daughter, “I could relate and did so enthusiastically.” There’s something about Keats’s experience that really struck her. How might Keats work, refashion or expand our notions of relatability?

AN: Being also the child of an immigrant, I do think that in a totally literal sense, as a poetics of outside, there is something about Keats's uncertainty in relation to the literary tradition and cultural production in England that carries through and carries over to new readers. People understand his vulnerability, his desire to overcome it, and also not to betray his class position. That’s really powerful to readers. I’m always so gratified when my students respond to him with the enthusiasm that they do. It also takes me a little bit by surprise, because when you think about it Keats could actually be very foreign to 21st century readers, especially if they’re 19 years old. There’s all these crazy words. The language is very dense, and the syntax of it is very convoluted. By contrast, my students are deeply turned off by Wordsworth. And I’m so fascinated by that as an intuitive response to both of those poets.

EL: What can Keats teach us about the limits of our own present?

AN: The poetry and the critical work that most excite me demand difficulty in a Keatsian sense, not only by performing it but also by insisting that it be part of your experience of the work. Reading Keats is very painful. It always annoys me when people trot out this certain line about pleasure. The poetry is about sensuality, right? When people say sensuality, they make it a shorthand for something like enjoyment. And the truth of the matter is, many experiences of beauty are agonisingly difficult. Many experiences of love are, too. The refusal to shy away from that or to translate it into something that's more palatable, that’s really something exemplary about Keats’s project.

Now, the relationship between poetry and revolution is very vexed. I was thinking about this because I was rereading your collection of poetry, Other Life, as I knew we were going to hang out. I was thinking about that line “Boris Johnson is a cunt and Sean Bonney is dead,” and to close read you for a moment there's an echo of what you wrote about universities in Tank Magazine: “God all these new buildings are springing up all around me, and I can’t make my rent.” This is the poetic attempt at living in the contradiction. That line from Other Life always sticks out to me, because I remember a close friend of mine died a couple of years ago, when I was writing my second book, and a thought played over in my mind, whenever I would want to share something from the book with them, as if this person were still alive. But my very brilliant friend was dead. They couldn’t respond. This is just the kind of magnitude of the stupidity of that fact, right? When I think about that line of yours, it marks an absolute impasse, a certain sense of paralysis, because what does one do in a world, in this world when it seems utterly closed? I actually think that, for me, the poetry that I find most generative, the poetry that feels like it might see some kind of resistance is the poetry that often presents itself as being in that impasse, not poetry that is explicitly polemical, necessarily. That may be a quirk of mine, you know, but that line, I think about that line, and it makes me want to throw a brick through the window, you know?

EL: Yeah! I was reading an interview with Hannah Zeavin where you discussed the value in elliptical writing and obscurity. I was thinking about how in conservative criticism, obscurity is seen as the shrinking of meaning. How might the work of Keats help us to think of textual difficulty as an amplifier of possibility, rather than standing in for its removal or absence?

AN: One thing that's sort of fascinating to me is that not a lot of people experience Keats as a difficult poet. That’s because his poetry has the tactility that it does. People read a poem by Keats and they think they've had an experience of “Poetry.” In that sense, it’s very different from reading a poem by somebody like Shelley, where you might feel you’ve just read a political tract, or the transcription of somebody’s nightmare. With Keats people expect “Poetry”. That’s why in my book I keep emphasising his textual difficulty. I want to make room for that difficulty in our experience, not only of literature, but at the level of thought. There are times when you can have a revelation because you’ve short circuited a complicated thought process. And those moments are very meaningful as well. But at a time where people are in all domains of human existence increasingly pressed upon to make themselves marketable, slowing all these processes down and thinking about the value of difficulty in itself is really important.

EL: I was having a conversation with a friend recently about the authoritarian personality. We were talking about the difficulty in being within ambivalence and ambiguities, and talking about that in relation to violent transphobia, how ideology is a way of creating simplicity, away from the irreducible complexity of experience and of people.

AN: At the end of the book, in the section called ‘Speaking Poetry’, there’s a faint suggestion that poetry is authoritarian in its impulse. And criticism, too. In the sense that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes about in her essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading. She talks about Melanie Klein's division between the paranoid attitude, which is very hostile, and ultimately quite authoritarian, and the depressive position, which is reparative. For me, criticism is essentially a depressive art. Not necessarily because it is always interested in doing the work of repair. But because it has a time lag, right? It's always secondary to the object and depressive in that sense. It’s always chasing after the thing. It is not equal to the object that it desires. Whereas there’s just certain kinds of poetry, certain kinds of people who write poetry who have a much more paranoid and ultimately authoritarian disposition. Some of the poetry that Keats wrote tends toward that, such as ‘Ode on Melancholy’. It’s not comfortable with ambiguity at all. It goes through this pantomime of a very rigid presentation in gender difference; women are all mysterious bitches. It’s quite rare for Keats to articulate positions in such a fixed way. That's also the voice that you hear a lot in the love letters, such as, again, that kind of demanding dictatorial language that he uses to Fanny Brawne. There's that amazing line where he says that she has to be his to put on the rack, if he wants her. It’s a very sexy thing to say, and also a very terrifying thing to say. I hate when poets act like they’re the gentlest people in the world. I think that all poets are secretly, I don't want to say fascists, but authoritarian in their tendencies – whatever kind of politics they enact on the world.

EL: I love your book. One might say that it’s curiously unfashionable. That's also what I love about it – it doesn’t care whether it’s fashionable or unfashionable. Is there any particular value for you in the book being unfashionable?

AN: I don’t even know what the hell is fashionable because it seems to change so rapidly. I was talking to someone earlier about how astonishing It is to me that Katherine Rundell’s book about John Donne was on the bestseller list for months. I really liked that book, especially the total lack of apology for its nerdiness.

Thinking about the Romantic poets more generally, I guess Blake is the most eccentric. Keats was definitely the most antiquarian, besides Walter Scott or something. Blake’s eccentricity is made coherent by an incredible level of cohesion and continuity. When you see two Keats poems side by side they can look totally unfashionable because fashion is about seamlessness in appearance.

These days, even if people don’t have a poetic project, there’s still the market-driven demand to make oneself legible. Even when Keats was trying to publish his poems nobody knew what to do with them. Not only is he an antiquarian, he’s also so messy in his use of references. He’s not interested in actually being scholarly. Who the hell knows what he’s interested in, you know! It’s very adolescent in that way. It’s interesting to think how the adolescent is usually a figure of precocity, while also being in some ways an old-fashioned thinker. Maybe there’s a way in which when you’re an adolescent, you’re perched between different stages of development? That means that there's the slight promise of not necessarily going along with one particular trajectory.

EL: As you’ve mentioned, much of your critical work provides material and formal defences against the social injunction that arts value must be proven through demonstrable measurable outcomes. I was wondering if you might say a little more about that?

AN: To loop back to your earlier question, I do think that maybe what is fashionable is to present justification for everything. What's the value? What's the bang for the buck of the work that you do for the man on the street? Whose tax dollars paid for you to do this kind of work? In that sense, my book makes no bids for novelty. And I even say, you know, if you've never read anything on Keats, you don’t have to read this first. I would never want to presume that my book has the first or last word on things, and it isn’t really an age for small claims.

EL: We’ve been talking a lot about the flailing, messy substance of life. You said earlier that no one knew what to do with Keats poems. Your project, in some ways, puts some of your most difficult personal experiences inside Keats, and that really struck me.

AN: The truth of the matter is that heartbreak is very scenic. There’s a drama that’s intrinsic to it that goes back through millennia of literature. I don’t know if that makes it more lonely. I don't even know if it makes it more bearable. But it certainly makes it something that’s less messy, only because it belongs to a category of experiences that help people to understand it.

I remember once saying to Lauren Berlant, who was my dissertation advisor, that the second time you experience a breakup it’s much easier than the first time, even if you love that person more. She said: “Yeah, because you know you can survive it,” even though this experience that's in the book felt unsurvivable at the time (or it felt like part of me wouldn’t survive it). Nonetheless, I knew on some level it wouldn’t kill me. It may make me sad forever, but it won’t kill me.

All my work is about literature that nobody knows what to do with, in some sense. It blows my mind every time there are people who really look to Wordsworth for spiritual salvation. Talk about barking up the wrong tree! I find his poetry confrontational, hostile, and rebarbative. I’ve always wanted to write criticism that was responsive to those kinds of feelings and readerly responses. Keats is a poet who I find very difficult and painful to read. It was important to me to register that in criticism and language to say here’s another way of encountering this poetry that I don’t think is wrong, even though other people might not have the same experience of encountering it.

EL: Okay, one last question. What should good criticism do?

AN: Good criticism should make you have at least one thought that you haven’t had before.