Poetry: Reading it and Writing it!

This is a six-month course, but it has been divided into three parts that can stand alone. You are welcome to sign up to one, two, or all three! Please specify your preference when you email carla@rawwriting.co.uk to book your place.

Outline

In this course we will study the work of some major poets from the nineteenth century to today. Along the way, we will meet the key elements of poetry: rhyme, metre, forms like the sonnet, and crucial movements and styles, such as Romanticism and Modernism. Through reading and discussion, we will aim to enhance our understanding and above all enjoyment of the wonderful English tradition of poetry. And all this work will provide prompts and inspiration for our own writing, from formal challenges to themes – writing about nature, childhood, the modern city and much more.

Over the course you will write your own pamphlet of original poetry and have the opportunity to share it and develop your work with the support of constructive critique from the group. One session of each Part will be devoted to original work by the group.

Part One
September: 16th, 23rd, 30th; October: 7th, 14th, 21st

In the first six weeks, we will look at the Romantics and Victorians. We’ll start with the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads (1798) of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and read some of the other great nineteenth-century writers.

Part Two
November: 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th; December: 2nd, 9th
Here, we move on to the twentieth century, including a look at the modernist poet T S Eliot (The Waste Land 1922) and moving towards some important poets of the mid-century, the period of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath.

Part Three
January: 13th, 20th, 27th; February: 3rd, 10th, 17th

In the last part of the course, we follow modern poetry from the late twentieth century to today. We’ll also be able to see how contemporary poetry has been shaped and influenced by the past, while reflecting its own time.

More information…

Participants will be given the contents of each session in advance, so you will have time to prepare; and there will be suggestions for extension reading for those who wish to build on what we have read together. Texts of shorter poems will be provided but editions will also be recommended so you can bring your own copies if you wish. Longer poems will be set as homework to give us time to discuss them in class.

We are all aiming to be better readers and better writers. The aim of this course is to help with those goals!