Online Book Launch: On He Flared: Essays on Four Letters of John Keats by Susan Wolfson
Sunday 31 October 2021, 6.00pm — 7.30pm
Join us on Keats' birthday to celebrate the publication of On He Flared: Essays on Four Letters of John Keats by Susan J. Wolfson.
The evening will include a series of readings from Keats's letters by Fred Fergus at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.
Visit the Keats-Shelley House YouTube Channel to watch the premiere, 6pm Sunday 31 October.
On He Flared: Essays on Four Letters of John Keats by Susan J. Wolfson will be published by the Keats-Shelley House on 31 October to coincide with John Keats’s birthday. To mark the occasion and launch the book join us for a virtual event on 31 October in the form of a reading of selections from Keats’s letters explored in the book. Keats-Shelley200 actor Fred Fergus will read from Keats's bedroom. The book has been designed entirely in-house and printed in Rome. All proceeds from sales will go directly to the upkeep of the Keats-Shelley House.
Keats’s poet-autobiography, The Fall of Hyperion, breaks off at the words “on he flared”, about a god who, having seen the fall of brother gods to mortality, knows his doom, yet meets it with fierce resistance. Here are four of Keats’s letters showing the man and the craftsman embracing life’s energies with death on a too-near horizon: on he flared.
This book is published by the Keats-Shelley House and all revenues from sales go towards the museum's Keats-Shelley200 appeal.
“Susan J. Wolfson is among the most perceptive, witty, and engaging of Keats’s numerous interpreters, and this collection of essays about four letters by Keats is the perfect introduction to his life and times.” Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies, Georgetown University
“Sharp, shrewd, and smart – in this volume Susan Wolfson engages brilliantly with John Keats’s greatest letters, attentive to his verbal genius in its finest and most subtle details and inflections. Each of these four remarkable essays carries us with fresh understanding into the heart of Keats’s extraordinary achievement.” Nicholas Roe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews and author of John Keats: A New Life.
