Event Archive
This is an archive of past events within the Department of English Studies. Please see our current events for forthcoming activities.
Some of our public events are recorded and are available as podcasts via our Research English At Durham blog.
Robert Graves and Modern Poetry
An Inventions of the Text seminar.
Evoking my own early and abiding interest in Robert Graves's poetry this lecture examines some of the reasons for his comparative lack of presence in contemporary poetry criticism despite the fact that he has consistently been appreciated by, and influential on, succeeding modern British and Irish poets. These prominently include Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and the lecture examines elective affinities and inter-relationships. It does so in the main by a close reading of several poems designed also to suggest Graves's major poetic strengths. These readings will consider such things as: the appropriateness of an ekphrastic analogy; the displacement of Graves's own dubious 'Goddess' theory of poetry into something altogether more compelling by individual poems themselves; some implications of his metric; and his inventive re-modeling of seventeenth-century poetic tropes. The poems 'Conversation Piece', 'Love Without Hope' and 'The Straw' will be prominent among poems discussed.
Contact inventionsseminar@gmail.com for more information about this event.
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Events
We host a large number of conferences, lectures and seminars each year, many of them open to the public. Find out more on our Events page.
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Many of our public lectures, seminars and conferences are recorded, and can be listened to as podcasts.
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Next Event
- 20th January 2021
- Sensory Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Online (Zoom)
- Dr Erica Fretwell (University of Albany) and Dr Shannon Draucker (Siena College)