Poetry
On our lively poetry courses, enjoy explores this captivating genre, revisit classic texts and discover new writers plus share your views in classroom discussions.
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An introduction to poetry
Course Date: Sat 3 Nov 2018
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetAlways wanted to read and discuss poetry? Enjoy this introduction to a range of poetry from the last 400 years and explore how the poets shape our responses.Full fee: £29.00Senior fee: £23.00Concession: £15.00 -
Faith and doubt in Victorian poetry
Course Date: Sun 18 Nov 2018
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetVictorian Britain saw an upsurge of religious affirmation in the context of profound unease concerning the assertions of faith. We shall consider how the work of the age’s most accomplished poets expresses that paradox.Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £25.00 -
Literary Evening Lecture: David Constantine - What my poetry owes to translation
Course Date: Fri 30 Nov 2018
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetCome and join us for a stimulating evening of lecture and discussion at our November Literary Evening Lecture, where the writer and translator David Constantine will read from his poetry. He will also talk about how translating from foreign languages has helped him in his own writing. The evening will include a more general discussion of the need for translation in the making of any nation's poetic language.Full fee: £9.00Senior fee: £9.00Concession: £9.00 -
Poetry cooked and raw: from Emily Dickinson to the Beat poets
Course Date: Tue 15 Jan 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetExplore how poets moved during the 20th century from formal language and regular form towards more natural language, freer forms and more direct expression of feeling, including the Beat Poets, confessionalism and prose poetry.Full fee: £179.00Senior fee: £179.00Concession: £79.00 -
Milton: Paradise Lost – ‘Our inner freedom’
Course Date: Sat 26 Jan 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetParadise Lost excites fascination and controversy, confronting the existence of evil in a divinely ordained world. We shall consider a representative selection of crucial passages to illuminate the practical contemporary significance of this cosmic work.Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £25.00 -
An introduction to poetry: Auden, Larkin, Hughes, Plath and Heaney
Course Date: Sun 27 Jan 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetYou will read ,discuss and enjoy a selection of poetry by W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney in terms of their styles and themes.Full fee: £29.00Senior fee: £23.00Concession: £15.00 -
Bertolt Brecht: poet in times of revolution, war and exile
Course Date: Sun 27 Jan 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetThe day, led by the writer and translator David Constantine, will be an introduction to Brecht's life and times and an exploration of a range of his poetry.
Biography:
David Constantine, born 1944 in Salford, Lancashire, was for thirty years a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published a dozen volumes of poetry (most recently – 2014 – Elder); two novels, Davies (1985) and The Life-Writer (2015); and five collections of short stories. He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. For his stories he won the BBC National and the Frank O’ Connor International Awards (2010, 2013).The film 45 Years was based on his story In Another Country. With Helen Constantine he edited Modern Poetry in Translation, 2003-12. Later this year Bloodaxe will publish his new and greatly enlarged Selected Poetry of Hölderlin and Norton his translations, with Tom Kuhn, of more than 1000 poems of Bertolt Brecht.Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £25.00 -
Alexander Pope: 'The proper study of mankind'
Course Date: Sat 16 Feb 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetDiscover how Pope dominated the early 18C with a series of ambitious and astonishingly varied masterpieces, ranging from savage satire, via romantic eloquence, to his greatest philosophical and spiritual undertaking – An Essay on Man.Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £25.00 -
John Keats: 'The vale of soul making'
Course Date: Sat 2 Mar 2019
Location on this date: OS - Off SiteKeats pursued – vigorously and brilliantly – questions related to ultimate truths. We shall consider a representative selection of his poetry and letters, reflecting on how their creative insights can help illuminate our own experience and aspirations.Full fee: £39.00Senior fee: £31.00Concession: £20.00 -
Understanding poetry
Course Date: Sat 30 Mar 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetFrom Shakespeare and Milton to Ezra Pound and Frank O'Hara, what makes different types of poetry tick, and how can we gain the confidence to read them perceptively and with real enjoyment?Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £22.00 -
Five modern poets
Course Date: Mon 29 Apr 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetExplore the work of five giants of modern poetry – from Hardys’ moving reflections on love and loss, through Eliot’s revolutionary modernism, the poems of Larkin and Heaney to Carol Ann Duffy’s wry reflections on modern life.Full fee: £99.00Senior fee: £79.00Concession: £44.00 -
Wordsworth: the Prelude -'The growth of a poet's mind'
Course Date: Wed 1 May 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetThe Prelude is Wordsworth’s ultimate testimony, offering a richly varied poetic autobiography. We shall discuss extracts from each of the poem’s 14 books to gain a sense of the complexity and coherence of Wordsworth’s achievement.Full fee: £169.00Senior fee: £135.00Concession: £74.00 -
The poetry of Keats: a literary workshop
Course Date: Sun 5 May 2019
Location on this date: OS - Off SiteThis course, led by Nick Field, Build literature tutor and former Keats House Poet in Residence, will give you the chance to read, explore and discuss some of Keats' most significant poetry in the location in which many of them were written. Poems include "The Odes" and "The Eve of St.Agnes".Full fee: £39.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £39.00 -
Bob Dylan: 'busy being born'
Course Date: Sat 25 May 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetFor over 50 years, Bob Dylan has shown mercurial delight in striking out in unpredictable directions. We shall track the remarkable unfolding of his career, from classic Sixties compositions to his most recent album, Tempest (2012).Full fee: £49.00Senior fee: £39.00Concession: £25.00 -
Poetry and resistance: Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam and the decades of Soviet rule
Course Date: Thu 11 Jul 2019
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetThe three greatest poets of the revolutionary and Stalinist periods, and the ways their personalities and the calamitous events that beset their society found expression in works of unparalleled passion, intellectual sophistication and monumental restraint.Full fee: £59.00Senior fee: £59.00Concession: £26.00