Siegfried Sassoon

Margi Blunden, daughter of Edmund Blunden, talks about her father and his work. 

Adrian Barlow looks at the impact of World War One poets in the years immediately following the War, in late 20s and early 30s, and as we embark on the 100 year anniversary of the conflict. Adrian Barlow is the President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge C ... Show More

World War One was a conflict of empire, not of nation. In this lecture Dr Simon Featherstone looks at four distinctive poets who provide a version of empire that is much more nuanced than the imperial rhetoric of the established canon. Dr Simon Featherstone is Principal Lecturer ... Show More

Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmil ... Show More

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempl ... Show More

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contempo ... Show More

Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, dis ... Show More

Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that atte ... Show More

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a collection of poems. Jade Cuttle looks at the way her poems were described and asks what do we categorise as nature writing? Her essay considers the idea of "coining" and the work of a new generation of poet ... Show More

Conférence du 22 septembre juin 2014. Les soirées de la Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal consacrées à la poésie vivante sont une occasion de voir, écouter et goûter autrement les textes de grands poètes de langue française. Chaque soirée conçue comme une rencontre entre le poète et un i ... Show More