Meetings are held on the Second and Fourth Thursday of each month from 22^nd January 2026 - NEW MEMBERS WELCOME!

LITERATURE: 1000 years of English Poetry

This course will look at the development of English poetry, from Its purported beginnings to the present day. At the same time, we shall also pursue the development of the English language from Anglo-Saxon days to the present. A willingness to participate is essential  ( guidance, where needed is gladly given!)

The course will run approximately over 8 months and will take place on ZOOM every 2^nd and 4^th Thursday of a month at 10 am.

We shall begin on the 22^nd of January, 2026. As always, everybody is welcome ,and interested parties should contact me via email.

Programme:

1) A/S POETRY: the beginnings:
Dream of the Rood/The Wanderer/The Seafarer/Beowulf
 
2) The Wife’s Lament/Deor/The Lord’s Prayer
3) MIDDLE ENGLISH:to change and change again:
Piers Plowman/The Perl/Canterbury Tales
4)Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight/Adam lay ybounden/
 2 shorter poems.
 
Thereafter, conducted by participants with 4 poems per
Meeting by the following suggested poets:
 
5)THE 16TH CENTURY AND THE BECOMING OFMODERN ENGLISH
Philip Sydney,Thomas Wyatt,Shakespeare,Edmund Spenser
6) The 17th Century : liberty and restraint
John Donne,George Herbert,Andrew Marvell,
7) MILTON: Paradise Lost ( I shall do!)
8) The 18th Century :the age of mannerism
Samuel Johnson,William Blake,Alexander Pope,Helen Maria Williams
9) The 19th Century…The Romantics
William Wordsworth,John Keats,Elizabeth Barrett,Christina Rosetti,
Percy Shelley
10) and The Victorians
John Clare,Lord Tennyson,Gerald Manley Hopkins,Matthew Arnold
11) The 20th CENTURY..Individualism and the death of God
T.S.Eliot,D.H.Lawrence,W.H.Auden,Dylan Thomas,Sylvia Plath
12) your own choices…….
13) The first quarter of the 21st Century
Ocean Vuong,Ada Limon,RupiKaur,Simon Armitage,Carol Ann Duffy
          14) Our own individual choices
          15) Our own individual choices