Vendler has an interesting suggestion for getting to understand a poem—writing it out in longhand as if one were composing it. She thinks there is a sequence in which Keats is examining attitudes toward sense experience and how it fits with art, rejecting previous answers or at least making them more comprehensive. She proposes a structural principle for each poem (in Indolence it is “vacillation” between “languor and yearning” from “self-reproach to self-indulgence;” in Nightingale it is “the repeated antithesis between the earthbound poet and the free bird or the alternation between “ripeness” and “withering.”). What she says she is doing—finding a structure, then finding a “constitutive trope” (in Melancholy it is “admonition” or “exhortation,” for example), then looking at language—is not really consistent and much less important than the readings. The one for Grecian Urn is as nuanced as any I’ve read—I think including Cleanth Brooks, but I need to reread that. She says that the poet enters the scenes on the urn three times, each time with a different view of what the urn is and what it does. Each entry is a kind of hypothesis about aesthetic experience generally. The first hypothesis is that art tells a story—who are these people, and what are they doing, it is reasonable to ask. The second hypothesis is that the urn doesn’t recount a particular history, but shows universal or archetypal truth—the lover, the maiden, the piper are always arranged this way in terms of Love, Beauty, and Art. It’s us, we shouldn’t ask questions about who and when; we should just enjoy the beauty and regret the discrepancy between our short mortal love and life and what the art shows us as eternal. The third entry gets it right--suggests that the urn is not history or archetype—it is its own world, complete and asking of us just empathic identification which doesn’t seek to ask questions about who and when or see ourselves in it Even if it is completely invented, even if its experience is completely foreign, we can still enter it and enjoy it on its own terms. This reading is too beautiful not to be true, as Rosalind Franklin said, echoing Keats, when Crick and Watson showed her their model of the DNA molecule (Vendler doesn’t know that). But there are lots of bad things in this book, as there must be in one so assertive and ambitious. One niggling one is that Vendler doesn’t understand that Keats used the word bourn the way he always did because he misread Shakespeare—Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—and thought the word meant realm or area. Of course she didn’t have the benefit of the new OED, which as much as points this out about Keats. Another problem—since she sees the poems as a sequence that ends with “To Autumn,” she has to load that particular rift with too much ore: this poem, which is my favorite Keats poem, is made to say just about everything imaginable to be said about art and life and the senses and myth and corn. After a while, it gets to be just too much corn. But this is a good book, and I may just have to read what she says about Stevens, alhough I’m convinced nobody understands Stevens better than I do, and I don’t understand him at all. But I like him. ( )