Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over - like this world, and some of the people in it."

Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates Keats's Odes of 1819, written shortly before his early death and long considered his greatest poems. She offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say, especially in a time of political crisis. Nersessian's 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. Intimate and irreverent, Keats's Odes is a brilliant mix of the personal and political.