27th April 2022, 5.15-6.45pm
Professor Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes has been called “a radical and unforgettable reading” of Keats’s poetry, earning rave reviews in publications like the TLS, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe, which named it one of the Best Books of 2021. Nersessian collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. First published in February 2021 to coincide with the bicentenary of Keats’s death, Keats’s Odes is forthcoming in a new edition, out this fall from Verso Books.