Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Anahid Nersessian on John Keats ("Ode to Psyche")
3k Plays2 years ago
Anahid Nersessian joins Close Readings to talk about her favorite poem, John Keats's "Ode to Psyche." Anahid's most recent book, the extraordinary Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, is now available in a new edition.
Anahid is a professor of English at UCLA and the author of two earlier books: Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard: 2015), and The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: 2020). She has published in a wide variety of academic journals and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Please rate and subscribe to the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:01
Speaker
everybody, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am thrilled to be welcoming Anahid Narsasyan to the podcast today. Anahid is a professor of English at UCLA, and she's the author of three books, Utopia Limited, Romanticism and Adjustment, which came out from Harvard in 2015,
00:00:29
Speaker
The Calamity Form on Poetry and Social Life from Chicago in 2020, and a book that I think we'll be talking about some today, Keats's Odes, A Lover's Discourse, also from Chicago, but in 2021 with a new edition out this year from Verso.
00:00:49
Speaker
Anna has published everywhere a person might want to publish, if that person were a poetry scholar. In terms of academic journals, she's published in places like PMLA and Critical Inquiry, ELH, New Literary History. And also increasingly, I've been delighted to see that in recent years, Anna has been
00:01:12
Speaker
publishing in places like the New York Review of Books, where I've just seen a new piece from her on Bjork of all things. So that is very exciting. And I'm not on this podcast, I'm not going to give very lengthy intros beyond giving the facts as I've just done, but I do want to just take a brief moment to
00:01:40
Speaker
share some of Anna's words with the audience at the outset of this podcast.
Focus on Keats's 'Ode to Psyche'
00:01:47
Speaker
Oh, one thing I haven't said, the poem. The poem that we'll be talking about today is one of Keats's Odes, one of John Keats's Odes. And the poem that we'll be talking about today is Keats's Ode to Psyche. Here's something that Anna writes about the Odes.
00:02:07
Speaker
in the introduction to her book that I want to share with our listeners. The Great Ode's record loves complementary processes of absorption and dissolution. They are, in Keats's phrase, quote, havens of intense-ness, end quote, where the most unsparing expressions of desire can be at once sheltered and laid bare.
00:02:30
Speaker
Sexually engrossed, though never explicit, they make intimacy into a form of endurance, difficult but necessary. This is an erotic sublime in which, as Keats says, we are pressed upon, and that's Keats's phrase, by those to whom we come close and those to whom we never seem to get close enough. Again and again, trials of longing, needing, having, caring,
00:02:58
Speaker
giving in, breaking down, leaving and failing to leave behind, are met with candor and a fearless enthusiasm. For this poetry is honest, not in any limited moral sense, but because it is obstinate in its commitment to loving without shame or reservation.
00:03:20
Speaker
And Ode by Keats is just that, an anchorage for big feelings that in their sheer ungovernability, test what it might be like to be really free. It's an imperfect approximation, to be sure. Poetry is the art of taking what you can get. My copy of this book is like,
00:03:48
Speaker
covered with underlinings and that passage in particular. And I love it because I think it's just so characteristic of what we get throughout Anahid no Sisyan's work, which is hard and clear thinking and also a kind of
00:04:11
Speaker
a verve and honesty and a commitment to telling her reader precisely what it is she thinks about something that I find just so refreshing and so exciting. And the Keats book in particular is one that I think everybody should read. One
Personal Reflections and Connections
00:04:33
Speaker
thing I was going to mention to you, Anahid, before we started,
00:04:37
Speaker
this call is that I'm planning on assigning it to a class in the spring. I mean, I think it's a wonderfully accessible book to all kinds of readers, but it's also just full of brilliance and original thought. And so I'm so excited to have you here. I'm so excited to have you here to talk about Keats. Anahid Narsasyan, welcome to the Close Readings podcast. Or should I call you Ana, which is what I called you when I first met you, I think. And I'm not sure what name you prefer to go by.
00:05:05
Speaker
You know, it's so funny when you were talking, I was thinking we shouldn't let this podcast go by without acknowledging that I think this fall we've now known each other for 20 years. That's a long time. Right. So I just was thinking when you were speaking, I've known Calm Run for half my adult life, which seems just absolutely unbelievable and miraculous in many ways. And I remember, you know, for context,
00:05:33
Speaker
You were a graduate student when I was an undergraduate at the same university, and I remember you giving a guest lecture on Keats' letters in Paul Fry's romantic poetry class. And so it's sort of, you know, moving and astonishing to be talking to you about Keats. You know, this seems like a special thing that doesn't happen very often.
00:05:55
Speaker
on a kind of technology that didn't even exist back then. No, we never could have dreamed that we would be doing a podcast, you know, on, you know, Zencast or whatever. So yeah, no, it's really incredible. And one thing also keeps with such a devoted correspondent, one thinks that Keith would have made the most of Zoom. Oh, for sure. The technology available to him.
00:06:18
Speaker
But yeah, it's true that when I was an undergraduate, I always went by Anna, and my close friends call me Anna. And then when I went to graduate school, I had written on a heed, of course, on all my applications, and then professors would call me on a heed by default. And I realized that I sort of liked having a distinction between what at the time started to feel like the private and the more public or the more professionalized. And so most people call me Anna.
00:06:46
Speaker
Most people that I'm close with call me Ana, but I'm always happy to be called Anaheed. It's a name that not even my family called me my whole life and my parents still call me Ana. And the other thing I was thinking while you were speaking is it's so nice to see both your Iranian name on the screen and also my Iranian name on the screen because we both have Iranian names.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. Isn't that nice? It's sort of thrilling. The name, the name Anahid, you know, if I can like indulge in a certain kind of narcissistic self-reflection on the way to. That's what this is all about. Yeah. Indulge. On the way to talking about the poem. So as you, as you probably know, Anahid is the Iranian version of the goddess Ishtar, also known as Inanna.
00:07:44
Speaker
And the story of Inanna's defense into the underworld, which is a very, very powerful Sumerian myth, gets actually reiterated in the story of Psyche. And so there is something about this poem that I feel very personally connected to because that, you know, that story of a defense into the underworld that Psyche undertakes is also one undertaken by the goddess who is my namesake.
00:08:12
Speaker
So that hadn't occurred to me until I started writing about the poem in a serious way in the Keep book. But now I feel an even more passionate attachment to the poem than I did before. And I routinely tell people, you know, sort of just to kind of, I don't know, maybe unsettle them that Ode to Psyche is my favorite poem. Full stop. Well, if you know how it is when you're a poetry professor, people say, what's your favorite poem? And the impulse is to say, well,
00:08:37
Speaker
I wouldn't say that I have a favorite poem or it would be impossible. How can, you know, a parent choose? This parent can choose. But how can you choose among other people's children or, you know, whatever. But yeah, for me, it's owed to Psyche. I say that consistently and I feel it pretty consistently. So I'm always delighted to talk about it.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, I say the moose by Elizabeth Bishop, but I'm not sure that I always mean it. I wonder if we were to like sort of pull Keats scholars
00:09:11
Speaker
about what their favorite ode was even, what would tend to finish first? This is a silly question, and it's not where I thought we'd start at all. And we should, in a moment, get to my asking you to read the poem aloud. But what, I mean, you know Keats Scholars better than I do. I was only pretending to be one 20 years ago. What do you think they would say?
00:09:33
Speaker
My money would be on O2 and Nightingale. I think that's the one that people feel very personally confected onto because it's probably the one that has the most intensely lyrical by which we might say it means something like intimate voice. The other ones have considerably more distance.
00:09:51
Speaker
built into them. But, you know, that one has all the great minds that surface again and again. Now more than ever things are rich to die, tender is the night, you know, on and on and on. I love the forlorn, the very word is like a bell. I love that. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. So, Anna, both are fun. I suppose the podcast is kind of this
00:10:13
Speaker
sort of threshold space between professional kind of public decorum and private intimacy. So I may slip back and forth. Apologies in advance for that. I really am thrilled to have you here. But yeah, like I said, before we go any further, I wonder if you could indulge our audience with a reading of the poem. For people who are listening
00:10:42
Speaker
To us now, know that I will put a link to the text of the poem in the show notes and as a part of the newsletter that gets sent out along with each episode. So if you want to glance at it as we're talking about it, you can do that, of course. But it would be great if we could listen to you reading it for us. OK. Oh, goddess.
00:11:08
Speaker
Here these tuneless numbers wrung by sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, and pardoned that thy secrets should be sung even into thine own soft, conscient ear. Surely I dreamt today, or did I see the winged psyche with awakened eyes. I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly, and on the sudden, fainting with surprise, saw two fair creatures, couched side by side in deepest grass.
00:11:37
Speaker
beneath the whispering roof of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran a brooklet scarce aspied. Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, blue, silver-white, and butted tyrians, they lay calm breathing on the bedded grass. Their arms embraced, and their pinions too. Their lips touched not, but had not bad adieu. As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
00:12:07
Speaker
and ready still past kisses to outnumber at tender eye dawn of a Rorian love. The winged boy I knew, but who was thou, O happy, happy dove, his psyche true? O latest born and loveliest visions far of all Olympus sated hierarchy, fairer than seedy sapphire regioned star, or vesper amorous glow worm of the sky,
00:12:35
Speaker
fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, nor altar heaped with flowers, nor virgin choir to make delicious moan upon the midnight hours. No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet from chain-swung-sensor teeming, no shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heaps of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming. O brightest, though too late for antique vows,
00:13:05
Speaker
too, too late for the fond believing liar, when holy were the haunted forest boughs, holy the air, the water, and the fire. Yet even in these days so far retired from happy pieties, dilucent fans, fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see and sing by my own eyes inspired.
00:13:31
Speaker
So let me be thy choir and make a moan upon the midnight hours. Thy voice, thy wheat, thy pipe, thy incense sweet from swing and censor teeming, thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat of tail-mouthed prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fain in some untrodden region of my mind where branches thought
00:13:58
Speaker
new grown with pleasant pain instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. Far, far around shall those dark clustered trees fledge the wild ridged mountains steeped by sea. And thereby zephyrs, streams and birds and bees, the moss-lame dryads shall be lulled to sleep. And in the midst of this wide quietness, a rosy sanctuary will I dress
00:14:25
Speaker
with the rebid trellis of a working brain, with buzz and bells and stars without a name, with all the gardener fancy air could fame, who breeding flowers will never breed the same. And there shall be for thee all soft delight that shadowy thoughts can win, a bright torch and a casement oat at night to let the warm love in.
00:14:55
Speaker
Oh, thank you very much. What a banger.
00:15:01
Speaker
What a banger. What a banger. Absolutely. It's a great choice. And you know, so people sort of curious about this. Remember, when I'm inviting people onto this podcast, I'm letting them choose the poem. So I mean, I sort of gently suggested Keats to Anna, but Psyche was her choice, and I can see why.
00:15:26
Speaker
Maybe it would be useful for people who don't, aren't up on their sort of mythology and so on to hear you talk a little bit about. Well, maybe I can ask the question in this way. What would Keats have known of the Cupid and Psyche story? And then as a kind of follow up to that question, what seems interesting to you about
00:15:56
Speaker
Any sort of liberties he takes or departures he performs from that donne. You want to give us that kind of context?
Myth of Cupid and Psyche
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So Keats would have known the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is first set down.
00:16:15
Speaker
in prints or in text in prose by a guy named Apuleius in Roman Antiquity and he knew in a series of stories which are sometimes referred to as the Metamorphoses and sometimes referred to as the Golden Axe and so Keats would have known that text
00:16:33
Speaker
probably both in Latin and in English, because he could read Latin, though he very famously could not read Greek. But he could read Latin and obviously could read English. So he probably read a translation of that story that gives an account of the
00:16:52
Speaker
let's call it a sort of romantic comedy of Cupid and Psyche, and the story goes like this, and people will recognize its contours from, for example, the story of Beauty and the Beast, which is built on the Cupid and Psyche-ness. So there's a very beautiful young woman named Psyche who is so beautiful that it arouses the jealousy of the goddess Venus, and so Venus calls upon her son Cupid,
00:17:17
Speaker
to use one of his arrows, which has the power to make anyone who is shot with one fall in love with whomever they first lay eyes on. She calls upon her son to shoot Psyche with an arrow and make her fall in love with some kind of monstrous being. I think the expression is, you know, a creature that is the lowest of the low, so a base being. And Cupid
00:17:43
Speaker
goes to do his mother's bidding and accidentally shoots himself with his own arrow or scratches himself on his own arrow. And so he falls in love with Saiki. And he designs to have her brought to him as a kind of sacrifice. So word goes out to Saiki's father through the auspices of some oracle that Saiki will never find a husband
00:18:09
Speaker
that but that she should be offered in a kind of matrimonial sacrifice to some awful, terrifying, winged serpent. And so with much hemming and hawing and much grieving for his child, the psyche's father deposits her on a mountain top and thinks that he will never see her again. At that point, psyche is lifted up by Zephyr the West wind and deposited in a magical palace where
00:18:34
Speaker
There are lots of servants, but they're all invisible. So all of her needs are met, but she doesn't see anybody.
00:18:42
Speaker
There's a beautiful line. It's hard not to imagine the animated beauty and the beast as you talk about the story. Right, go on there. Yeah, or, I mean, yes, 100% the animated beauty and the east, but also the cocteau film La Belle et La Bette, where there are really, really beautiful gestures around this idea, these candelabra that are made of human hands. And I think the line that Papalais uses is she had only voices for handmaiden. So she's essentially alone.
00:19:12
Speaker
and has everything she wants, so good and beautiful clothes. And at night, a mysterious figure who she cannot see because he's shrouded in darkness comes to her, and we are to understand, makes love to her, but forbids her to see his face and always disappears before morning. Eventually, Psyche's two jealous sisters, which feature in French versions of the Beauty and the Beast story, though they do not feature in the Disney version, there are these two jealous sisters
00:19:40
Speaker
who come and visit Psyche and say, you know, what's the story with this guy? Why can't you see his face? He must be some monster. And they persuade her that she should try to uncover the mystery of who this mysterious man is because for all she knows, maybe he really is a winged serpent and maybe he's going to kill her. So she does exactly this. She waits until her lover falls asleep and she takes a lamp and brings it close to his face so she can see who it is. And lo and behold, it turns out to be not a monster, but the God of love himself.
00:20:10
Speaker
And so as she's doing this, she also nicks herself on one of his arrows. And so now she is also, you know, kind of irrevocably in love with him. She then spills by accident a drop of burning wax from her oil lamp onto his shoulder. Cupid wakes up and horrified by her lack of trust and by her whatever we want to call it, her kind of her impudence.
00:20:36
Speaker
he abandons her, he flies out of the palace and goes back to his mother's house to recuperate both from the heartbreak of Psyche's betrayal and also from the womb. He sounds like such a baby. Yeah, you know, I think that that's part, I think that that is something that we are to understand about the story, you know. And so then Psyche has to go through a series of trials in order to reclaim
00:21:04
Speaker
Cupid, at least that's the explicit suggestion, but also to refine her own soul. And the word psyche means two things. It's the Greek word for butterfly and it's the Greek word for soul. So her story is, as Pete said in one of his letters, is really about the hammering of the raw material of human consciousness to turn it into a soul, you know, to give it magnum ability, which means the largeness of soul.
00:21:32
Speaker
And so the final one of those trials involves Venus, her future mother-in-law, involves Venus, commanding her to descend into the underworld and bring back a piece of the queen of the underworld, Persephone's beauty in a box. And so Persephone gives her some beauty in the box, and she's forbidden to look into it. And of course, she looks into it and she dies, or she almost dies.
00:21:59
Speaker
And then in the nick of time, Cupid, realizing the error of his ways, flies out of the window of his mother's house, which I mentioned because that keeps his poem, reverses that action in its final line, flies out of the window of his mother's house and to Psyche's side and revives her. And she is then deified. And so the two of them, the soul and love, Cupid is the God of love, they have a daughter whose name is Pleasure. So
00:22:29
Speaker
That's the end of that. It's a very, very happy ending to the story, and I hope this came out. It actually has lots of comic elements, even slapstick elements built into it while also being very moving and very true to certain kinds of difficult experiences in life. But we've all been through where we feel as though we have been kicked into the underworld, either by our own inadvertent design or by certain types of events.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah. Slapstick and moving, but also at times, I want to say quite terrifying or kind of traumatic or something, we might say. Yeah, absolutely. The story is totally very strange. The psyche thinks she's marrying a monster. She's absolutely terrified. Lo and behold, it's not so bad after all. Ben Cupid's outside
00:23:24
Speaker
reaction to what he perceives to be her lack of faith in him is very traumatic, I think, as well. And then the idea of, you know, of course, you know, going into hell to seek out beauty and dying in the bargain, you know, before being revived is also quite terrifying.
00:23:47
Speaker
So not much of that is in the ode. So talk about that. We don't get that narrative. We get something what, like in the aftermath of that narrative? Will you say anything about that? Yeah. That's the thing that I respond to so much in this poem, is that it's a poem written
00:24:06
Speaker
in many kinds of aftermath. So most obviously in the aftermath of this long and sort of torturous tale of Cupid and Psyche, this is not just the happy ending, but what you see after the happy ending, right? Sexual intimacy, rest, a quiet connection, all of those things. It's the aftermath of this epic and difficult narrative of love. It's also the aftermath, as Kate says, of
00:24:36
Speaker
Antiquity. The gods are gone. The forest boughs are no longer holy. There are no longer temples where priests are swinging sensors. All that's gone too. Here we are in modernity. So he then tries to say, and I think says really beautifully and successfully if we want to use terms like that, that he will be Psyche's priest, that she doesn't need a temple. You know, she's come too late for that moment, but she can provide her with another kind of honor.
00:25:06
Speaker
And then the poem stands in proof of that. Yeah, so as I've been sort of rereading and rereading
00:25:16
Speaker
the poem in preparation for this conversation and reading your brilliant chapter. And so the structure of Anahid's book on Keats' odes is that there's basically like one essay for each ode, and the essays are very interestingly kind of experimental in their nature, mixing what I think most would recognize as sort of straightforward literary criticism with some measure of autobiography, though that
00:25:46
Speaker
comes and goes and sometimes is at best sort of dimly perceived by the reader. That's all very interesting, the interplay of those things, as I was reading all of this in preparation for today.
00:26:00
Speaker
We kept trying to figure out what is the position. So the Psyche and Cupid story, as you tell it, is very much the story of a dyad, the two of them. And I suppose there are figures on the periphery of that.
00:26:19
Speaker
Cupid's mother, for instance, it sort of hovers on the margins of the story. But as you say, like when we first see them here, there are these two figures who are almost, they're so intertwined that their bodies are almost sort of indistinguishable or they look like a couple more than they look like two. Hard to tell them apart. What I was wondering was what kind of relationship is Keats, like how is he trying to insert himself into this?
00:26:48
Speaker
Couple is he a voyeur is he trying to take the place of cupid or how do you or of psyche for that matter? How do you? How do you sort of? read that Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean it is it is an intensely voyeuristic poem at least it begins with a scene of voyeurism, right? I was wandering in the woods and then I found these two people who had presumably just been having sex You know, and as he said, you know are gonna have sex again, but in this moment they're resting, you know, they're in the kind of they're in the downtime
00:27:18
Speaker
And he immediately becomes enthralled with the figure that he doesn't instantly recognize. So he instantly recognizes Cupid and says almost admissively, the winged boy I knew, whatever, you know, but who was foul, you know, and psyche becomes an object of absorption for him. And
00:27:40
Speaker
I don't, and I think to some degree an object of identification, because all of Keats's poetry from the very, very early material of Endymion, Keats's first major work, to the last and unfinished Hyperion epics, all of it is about this work of forging the soul, this work of how a human being becomes a soul being, a being capable of empathy, of grace, of forgiveness, which is what the story of Psyche is about.
00:28:10
Speaker
And so there's identification with the soul's journey in the poem. And so the poet identifies very much with the figure who is named soul. But there's also the suggestion of a kind of romance between stupid and psyche as well. So in that last line, when he says, my brain will be the temple and the place where you meet your lover,
00:28:38
Speaker
he becomes the container for her sexual relationship with Cupid. And so he continues to insert himself, he continues to want to be the third wheel in the romance in a way that is very unlike most
00:28:57
Speaker
poems of this kind, by which I mean odes, and then also more generally poems that address, for example, a goddess figure in which you would imagine that the poet gets to be alone with his goddess. That doesn't seem to appeal to Keith. He actually likes the idea of being in a group with both Cupid and Psyche. And I find that sort of cheeky and charming.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Cheeky and charming and yet you also tell us that in your reading this poem is also about the idea of sexual shame and sort of how we live with that feeling or what we do with it and the idea of secrecy.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so maybe this is a moment where I could ask you to point to some places in the poem where those ideas feel most vital to you and help us see them along with you. Yeah, well, if you think about the story of Cupid and Psyche, it seems
00:30:05
Speaker
At least the way that I told it, and obviously I told it in a way that I believe it should be told. But it seems as though the confrontation that happens between Cupid and Saiki happens because she blows up the secrecy of their relationship. He is content to come to her at night, to not let her see his face, and to satisfy his love for her and his longing for her.
00:30:34
Speaker
in a way that works for him because it's covert and he cannot feel, I mean, I don't want to psychologize this as a mythological figure, but essentially he doesn't betray his mother because he doesn't make his relationship with psyche public. So he can continue to be essentially his mother's agent, you know, and not, and not betray her while also having his cake and eating it too. So it seems as though when she cast light literally on the situation,
00:31:02
Speaker
That's the essence of the betrayal. So again, the poem is written in the aftermath of that. And you'll notice, and we can look, as you said, we should look at the poem. Notice that the poem is absolutely chock full with images of light and illumination and revelation. So he calls Psyche, what name does he give her? Brightest. That's the episode that he uses for her. She's bright.
00:31:29
Speaker
And there are these moments in the very first line, right? How does he psyche, how does he see psyche with awakened eyes? How, you know, are they lying next to each other at tender eye dawn? And it just, you know, exemplary phrase from teeth, you know, at tender eye dawn of Arorian love, Arorian meaning having to do with the dawn. So there's a redundancy there. So the whole poem is about
00:31:57
Speaker
having one's eyes open, but also about being revealed and being revealed not in a context of shame, but in a context of trust, intimacy, you know. And so that, I think, too, is something that seems to be really keen on delivering to us as the coda to the myth. If the myth is about, you know, how you can lose
00:32:27
Speaker
people when you try to bring a situation to light or you try to cast light on it, the coda of the poem has to be about how a relationship can actually live in the daytime, you know, what it means to bring a relationship out into the sunshine, you know, to bring it into the dawn of love. So that... And when you say the coda of the poem, what you mean is like the coda that the poem is to the story? Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the coda that it is to the story.
00:32:56
Speaker
right so so um so interesting if i heard you right and so tell me if i've got this right what what sort of at stake in cupid's attempt at secrecy has something to do with and i know you said you didn't want to psychologize the um mythological figure but i'm just going to do it and then you'll have to deal with it um is a kind of over weaning desire to maintain a kind of fidelity to his mother so that there's something kind of
00:33:29
Speaker
infantile about the kind of anxiety about keeping it secret. And so phrased that way, I can imagine why someone like Keats would be kind of impatient with or not satisfied by that sort of, you know, would want to take the other side, in other words. Is that how you're seeing it here?
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, and it's probably worth saying, I mean, I'm sure people just caught this when we were speaking, but the word psychology has at its core the name psyche, right?
Psychological and Philosophical Explorations
00:34:02
Speaker
So psychology is the study of the soul, you know? And so in some sense, maybe it's right to psychologize Cupid because the story of Cupid and psyche, you know, is also a meditation on his soul and the state of his soul. It's a referendum on or an evaluation of his soul as well. Yeah, there's a reason why Cupid refers to Cupid.
00:34:23
Speaker
a tiny bit dismissively as a boy. And a lot of commentaries, 18th century commentaries on the poem draw attention, excuse me, a lot of 18th century commentaries on the story of Cupid and Psyche draw attention to that idea of Cupid as at least at the beginning of the story being an infantile figure. And there's a passage in a book about Greek myth that keeps you very well. And the author says that
00:34:52
Speaker
the image there, he's talking about a particular image of Cupid he has in his mind and the image of Cupid that this author has in his mind is of a boy burning a butterfly for fun. And again, the word psyche means soul and butterfly. So there's a suggestion that in his immaturity, Cupid, it tortures psyche, and he does torture her, you know, her going through these multiple trials is a form of torture.
00:35:19
Speaker
And so, you know, one could say that her reward at the end of the myth getting to marry Cupid is perhaps no reward at all, you know, because what has he done for her lately? But I still find it very romantic. I mean, whatever, I'm a sucker. Yeah, well, join the club.
00:35:41
Speaker
And if we take the etymology seriously and we think of the soul as like a butterfly, I mean, what that would suggest, I would think, is that the soul is sort of beautiful, yes, and kind of flutters about, but also very kind of vulnerable and delicate and that sort of thing. You were talking earlier about Keats's
00:36:02
Speaker
I don't know what the right word would be to use here, investment or attachment or something to this idea of soul making. And that suggests to me at least a more kind of durable or rugged kind of version of what the soul might be. So, you know,
00:36:27
Speaker
I suppose that might help me understand why Keats would want to tell this part of the story, because this is the part in which Psyche has survived the ordeals, but isn't subject to them in that way. One of the things you talk about in your essay, Ana, is
00:36:53
Speaker
what the kind of political valence of coupledom might be. So I hope it won't embarrass you too much to have me read to you from yourself just a little bit more. But here's the thing you say, a couple is not a revolutionary society, to be sure. It is nonetheless the model Keats gives of a communal existence set loose for many in position except the sweet enforcement of appetite and ardor.
00:37:25
Speaker
So say more about what, in this poem anyway, is just a place to begin what is sort of political or potentially political about being a couple for kids. Yeah, that's a really great question. I think that in the poem, and you mentioned this at some point earlier when we were talking,
00:37:48
Speaker
that in the poem there are very, very few, certainly in that first verse paragraph, there are very few gendered words, right? So there's the possessive his psyche true that comes in at the very beginning, but otherwise it's all they, there, you know, there's a sense that the couple or that the two bodies are basically indistinguishable from one another without exactly being the same.
00:38:13
Speaker
And so it seems to me that in that there is a model for something like a collectivity that takes us out of the prison of being an individual, you know, that allows us, and a lot of people have said this, you know, that one of the things about love is that it allows us to experience minimally and also at best a rehearsal of what it is to belong to a group or just what it is to belong to something outside of yourself.
00:38:41
Speaker
And so I think that that is partly what interests me about this theme, this theme of sexual intimacy, that in some way pre-figures or could be said to pre-figure a utopian society in which people do live together, not in identity. So people live together even though they're not the same and people love each other even though they're not the same, but people can,
00:39:08
Speaker
support and care for one another in ways that require a great deal of selflessness. And so for Keats, I think love is a version of that selflessness now. But it's also worth saying that, speaking of psychologists and people, that as you know, in Keats' letters to Fanny Braun, the great love of his life, that selflessness sometimes
00:39:31
Speaker
tips over into a desire to be absolutely obliterated by the by the loved one or in the loved one. And that seems to have a slightly darker valence than the much more, you know, this is a sunnier version of things that I just described. Yeah, well, I wonder if that idea and yeah, everybody needs to read Keats's letters, if they haven't done so already. That
00:39:59
Speaker
that tendency, which you described just now as somewhat darker than the earlier version of it that we were talking about, is that related to or how is that related to something else you
00:40:14
Speaker
describe in the, I mean, if I had read on just another line past the moment where I'd read before, you said, you say that Keats also commits himself to extinction. So what do you mean, like to talk about the word extinction and where are you seeing that going on here? Is that some version of the sort of famous idea that maybe people have heard about with respect to Keats having to do with negative capability, this idea of the,
00:40:38
Speaker
of the soul sort of effacing itself or quieting down in response to some stimulus or object of attention? Or is it something else? I think negative capability as a principle is always operating in everything that Keats does, right? So Keats believed that a truly great poet could
00:41:03
Speaker
to really fully sink himself into the consciousness of other beings, including inanimate beings. So he thinks you could think you're, you know, Shakespeare takes as much pleasure to see in imagining an Iago as an Imogen, you know, as in imagining the heroine or the villain. But then he also says, you know, as a poet, I can be the moon, I can be the sun, I can be the breeze. And you get that in these really, you sort of see that play out in these really beautifully compressed episodes.
00:41:32
Speaker
that pop up all over Keeps' writing. In this poem, the one that I appreciated and knew as I was reading it out loud is the idea of the flowers being cool rooted, right? Is that what it says? I'm pulling up the poem again just to make sure that I'm really, this is close reading after all, right? It is, right. Where is that
00:41:58
Speaker
Where does it say that? I don't know. I'm, I'm seeing the nor nor alter heaped with flowers, but that's not what you're thinking of. Oh yeah. Cool rooted flowers in the first dance. Cool rooted flowers. I knew it was cool rooted flowers. Okay. So why are the roots of the flowers cool? Because they're underground. They're far enough underground. Everyone knows if you dig in the ground, eventually the ground is cold, right? Even on a summer's day. So he's imagining,
00:42:27
Speaker
what it, you know, I mean, if it doesn't sound too silly, what it's like to be a flower and have roots that go down far enough that they begin to touch the part of the earth that is cool. And so all of that, the experience of the flower in the world is pushed, smushed into these two words, cool rooted, you know? So to me, that's an example of negative capability. But in the poem, or I should say, and in the poems, Keats says to Psyche,
00:42:55
Speaker
Back in the day, gods and goddesses used to have temples built to them. They used to have whole religions constructed around them. They used to have armies of priests and priestesses and devotees. Well, we don't live in that kind of world anymore. You know, we live in essentially in a secular world. We don't live in that kind of world anymore. And so any temple that I build to you
00:43:17
Speaker
I can only build in my body and my body is mortal. So when I'm gone and my brain, which he describes as a wheezed trellis, you know, so a very organic object, right? Like a, like a fine climbing up trellis. When I am gone,
00:43:31
Speaker
of a working brain. That's such a great idea. What a great, you know, I did, you know, a lot of people have said Keith, of course, trained as a doctor, and would have seen brains. And I learned when I was writing the book, this isn't a detail that I got to include, because I just didn't have space for it. But Keith actually removed a bullet from somebody's brain when he was training as a doctor. Yeah. So she knew what a brain looks like, right? What a working brain looks like.
00:43:54
Speaker
So we know when peace is dead, his brain will dissolve into the earth like so much green matter and that will be it. And there's something really beautiful about imagining that kind of insubstantiality and transient as the most appropriate form of homage to a beloved goddess or to the idea of the soul. So yeah, there's a desire for extinction there that I think
00:44:22
Speaker
becomes, to use this word again, somewhat utopian. We don't need to leave a mark on the world in a really aggressive and monumental way. We can make these fleeting expressions of love mean something while they're here, and then they pass away, and so it is.
00:44:43
Speaker
It seems to have something to do with him, for him, at the end of the poem with the idea of receptivity of the sort of leaving the window open kind of receptivity to the world. Those first few lines of the final stanza of the poem, I'm just gonna read them briefly again so that they're fresh in mind. Yes, I will be thy priest.
00:45:12
Speaker
and build a fain. And so fain is another word for a kind of temple or shrine. Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fain in some untrodden region of my mind, where branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. It's, you know, I'd begun by asking you about
00:45:37
Speaker
whether Keats was trying to somehow insinuate himself into this post-Coital scene, whether he's being a voyeur or usurper or something like that. But here it seems like what he wants to be, like he wants to become the room in which that scene is happening somehow, that it's sort of all getting internalized into his brain. And I'm so,
00:46:04
Speaker
caught up on this reading with the with the play that's happening between the word pain and pines. You know, we talk about like pining away for someone or, you know, that kind of feeling of pining, which, you know, I've, I've, I've looked it up and etymologically, the, the
00:46:24
Speaker
The tree pine doesn't have anything to do with the pining as a kind of emotive or affective state, but here it's as though they do, right? It's as though sort of building that temple is a way of both sort of feeling pain and making room for this love scene to sort of take place within.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. There's not really a question there, but I don't know if you have something more to say about this idea of Keats sort of dissolving or sort of being okay with not leaving a mark, abandoning that fantasy, as you say. Yeah, it's funny. In his own life, Keats packed.
00:47:15
Speaker
pretty dramatically between wanting desperately to leave a mark. There's a very famous statement in one of his letters where he says, like the great confidence of youth, I think I shall be among the English poets when I die. And he's like 19 years old. And I actually don't think he's written the great Ogead. I can't remember. Yeah, I don't think that he's written the poems that he's most remembered for writing.
00:47:37
Speaker
And on the other hand, again, particularly in the letters to Braun, you see this obsessive recurrence to the scene of self-dissolution. And that seems to have been a very, very powerful fantasy for him, the idea of being so completely absorbed in another being that he himself would evaporate, you know? And I think that, again, in the poem, that's turned into this highly positive
00:48:05
Speaker
ideal that has no cynical or pathological valence to it whatsoever. And in fact, if anything is stood the whole against the whole idea of pathologizing love or pathologizing intimacy or pathologizing desire. So part of the reason I love this poem so much is it seems to me the one in which most successfully
00:48:30
Speaker
transcended his own neuroses and anxieties and created something out of them that shows us the way to, again, kind of descend out of the underworld of our own consciousness. And so the poem really, I think, in that precisely what it describes, not just as a poem, but also as an expression of peace's personality. Well, that's so beautifully said. And
00:48:57
Speaker
And I suppose we're nearing the time when we should try to draw this conversation, much as I'd like for it to keep going on and on to a conclusion. There's a moment where you talk about, sort of towards the end of your chapter, you talk about psyches.
00:49:20
Speaker
sort of not caring about whether her lover might be a monster. You say about Psyche, maybe she had things to say that couldn't be said in the dark and was tired of speaking like someone who does not want to be heard. And again, forgive me, but in the margin of my book right there, I wrote Anna,
00:49:44
Speaker
Well, I guess I just wondered if this is a moment for us to turn into something like self-reflection as critics or as people who write about poetry. It occurred to me that by the time you'd arrived at writing this book, maybe you had things to say that couldn't be said in the dark or were tired of speaking like someone who did not want to be heard.
00:50:13
Speaker
And maybe I could just ask you to, we could sort of bend around towards the conclusion of our conversation by my asking you to reflect on what writing this book meant for you at this point in your life. Yeah, that's such a great question. And indeed, you know, we could spend, I could certainly, I could spend a long time answering that question.
00:50:36
Speaker
You know, I had written before this book two works of pretty straightforward academic criticism. And in the second of those books, The Calamity Forum, there is a chapter on Wordsworth, the English poet, William Wordsworth, contemporary of John Keats, somebody that Keats admired and also resented very much. And the chapter begins by my saying that I don't like Wordsworth, which is not entirely
00:51:02
Speaker
true, I am kind of fixated perpetually on Wordsworth for a number of reasons. But when I wrote that chapter, I thought to myself that there was something really liberating about that use of the first person, both semantically it was liberating, you know, to just use the word, to use the word I in a sentence of critical prose, but it also felt conceptually liberating to think from a more personal and intimate place.
00:51:31
Speaker
about this poetry that I spend my whole life thinking about in teaching. So Peeps' Oats fell into my lap because it was more or less commissioned, if that's the right word, by my editor at Chicago. And I didn't have plans to write anything this personal. And yet it came at exactly the right time because I had already sort of tiptoed into that vein, you know, with this earlier book. So I was very grateful for it. And, you know, I think that you sort of said this earlier that
00:52:01
Speaker
the personal aspects of the book are the more memoiristic, yeah, memoiristic aspects of the book are pretty occluded or they're only dimly perceived. And I'm tempted to say that that's intentional, although I have trouble ascribing an intention to my writing. Always, you know, I'm not a particularly self reflective writer, I just sort of write what comes and then I edit it, but it's organic and very intuitive and not particularly planned. But
00:52:30
Speaker
I want to say that's intentional because it seems to me that one of the things I wanted the book to do was to imagine a way to write intimate experience that wasn't driven by the desire to merely recount facts, but rather to figure in language various kinds of psychological intensities and difficulties. So I think that it's a very, very
00:53:00
Speaker
exposed book for me, psychologically and emotionally. It's a very exposed book, but it doesn't have a lot of details in it. It doesn't have a lot of biographical details in it. And I just, you know, to me, that feels like a significant form of intimate self-disclosure, even though I think some people might be frustrated by it. To me, it feels very significant. Well, you've got to frustrate people sometimes, right?
00:53:28
Speaker
Maybe I can ask for one more bit of self-reflection as a way to end today. So I was also really moved in rereading the introduction to your book by something, well, that I've thought a lot about in my life. And it's a thing we sort of have in common beyond the coincidence of our having been at Yale at the same time, is that for the most part, and maybe there are exceptions to this, but you and I are both people who've written about
00:53:56
Speaker
you know, mostly white writers, poets, more or less canonical writers, again, for the most part. We were trained. I don't really love that word. I kind of use it reflexively. But, you know, we went to school and institutions that have sort of long intertwined histories with those kinds of canon formations.
00:54:26
Speaker
And yet both of us, you know, you talked about our Iranian names, both of us might look not quite like we belong in those clubs. Our names are both perhaps often mispronounced or what have you.
00:54:47
Speaker
And I wouldn't bring this up except that you write about it and you write about some of those facts in the introduction to your book. And so I guess just as a final question, can I ask you how writing this book on Keats gave you an opportunity to reflect on that
00:55:08
Speaker
curious kind of, I'm not sure again what the right word to use for it would be, paradox or tension or source of ambivalence in your own work and what you learned, if anything, from that particular kind of self-reflection.
Cultural Influences and Personal Identity
00:55:31
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s.
00:55:36
Speaker
which was a pretty difficult time to be or to have, you know, any kind of Iranian background. My father was born and raised in Tehran and, you know, has an Iranian passport. And so I remember some of my, I don't want to say they're my earliest memories, but some of my most significant childhood memories are of my father being told over any time we went through TSA and having his bags searched.
00:56:01
Speaker
And so I have a very, I had a very early sense of myself and of my family as being marked out in some way. And I was raised in a bilingual household, you know, I was largely taken care of for my grandmother, my father's mother. So I always had a sense that I was, you know, I had, as you probably experienced as well, like had a funny name, and your parents cook different kinds of food than your friends at home. And so there are things about you, you know, you kind of
00:56:30
Speaker
there are certain cultural habits that you have that are not shared by your friends. And so I always felt kind of marked out and different. And when you're young, difference is something that is generally rejected by your peers. And so because I felt I think very rejected, experienced a lot of, you know, kind of like peer rejection when I was quite young, say in elementary school,
00:56:57
Speaker
I desperately cast about for ways that I could make myself legitimate in the eyes of others, and I just so happen to be very good at reading, and then later pretty good at coming up with interesting things to say about books.
00:57:18
Speaker
becoming a student who was you know good at English or like did well in English class was an identity that took shape for me as a much more palatable and stable identity than the one that I was born into. And so I think that my sort of early relationship to the English literary canon and to you know dead white male poets
00:57:40
Speaker
was that they provided for me a kind of anchorage to use that word that I use in the Keith book, you know, that it was a it was a safe place, you know, it was a place reading and being around poetry was those were things that made me feel competent and secure in myself. And so then as I got older, then I started having a slightly more complex and indivisible relationship to that, you know, think about why is it that I work on
00:58:05
Speaker
white poet, why do I work on British romantic poetry in its most canonical inclination as opposed to working on, you know, different kinds of poets or different kinds of literature, you know, I could do that. And so I think that the Keeps book provided an opportunity for me simply to articulate those ambivalences. And then, and this is something that I talk about with my students all the time, try to see how those ambivalences could be
00:58:31
Speaker
potentiating by which I mean, they could actually make me a even better critic than if they didn't exist. Because I think sometimes with my undergraduates, they'll come in and they'll say that they feel resistant to something or they feel shut out of a certain kind of poetry or certain kind of writing. And I'll say, fantastic. You should write from that place. You should think from that place. Those aren't intuitions or feelings that you need to dismiss. You actually need to work from them.
00:59:01
Speaker
So the book was an opportunity to do that in a very explicit way.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:59:05
Speaker
While it was an opportunity beautifully taken by you and I'm so grateful for the book and I'm so grateful for our friendship and for the chance we've had to have this conversation.
00:59:20
Speaker
Anahid Norsasian, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. And I just want to invite everybody who's made it this far into this episode, and we've gone a little longer than I thought we would, but such is life, I guess, to invite everybody who's made it this far. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the podcast. Tell a friend. We have some very exciting conversations in the works, and I hope to keep talking with you soon. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Ana.