Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
 
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.

“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.”
 
In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here 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.

The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.”  Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.
 

Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets offers the first comprehensive analysis of Keats’s familiarity with the works of his most famous contemporaries: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Beth Lau considers a variety of questions: which volumes and individual poems Keats read, what editions he used, when he read them, where he might have acquired copies, and why he read and responded as he did to certain works at particular periods of his life. The book presents a complex, detailed portrait of Keats's intellectual relationships with the major poets of his age.This study situates Keats in the literary climate of his time and provides Keats scholars with a reliable record that may assist future intertextual, influence, biographical, or critical studies. While previous work has concentrated on Keats's debt to Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and other great Renaissance and Medieval writers, the most significant influences on a poet's style and outlook are generally contemporary sources. In fact, Keats's very interest in Renaissance and Medieval poetry and drama was a taste he shared with his age. Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets, in laying the groundwork for a new examination of the poet in relation to the literature of his time, helps us to see the Romantic poets as a genuine literary group that read and responded to one another's works.Each chapter contains an essay and checklists that conveniently organize information on Keats's familiarity with each of the other poets’ publications. The checklists also distinguish reliable evidence — direct references and quotations, items in Keats's library, and statements by people who knew Keats — from more conjectural echoes and allusions. The essays draw conclusions from the information presented in the checklists and consider other types of evidence that do not lend themselves to a checklist format. One source of such evidence is the libraries and literary tastes of Keats's friends: people like Charles Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, Benjamin Bailey, and William Hazlitt, who were influential in shaping Keats's opinions about literature. In fact, the book may be considered a study of two levels in Keats's relationship to his contemporaries: his literary relationships with the major poets of his day, and his personal interactions with an immediate circle that helped stimulate and focus his reading and thinking about poetry.Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets is an important reference work for scholars and critics interested in Keats, in the connections among the major poets of the early nineteenth century, and in biography and social history. The book’s clear, jargon-free prose makes it accessible to a variety of students and scholars.