Poetry Courses
Study online or in London

Explore the astonishing range of poetic responses to a hundred years of warfare, acts of witnessing, endurance, defiance and condemnation by writers across the globe: Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Britain, Apollinaire, Brecht, Milosz, Celan, Akhmatova and Stepanova in Europe and Russia, Darwish and Zhadan in the Middle East and Ukraine, and many others.

How do they describe the indescribable? This online course will look at the myriad ways poets - combatants and civilians - responded to the century of total war and are responding to its legacy now.

Come and join an introduction and exploration of the poetry of E E Cummings and Stevie Smith. We will read, discuss and enjoy a selection of their poetry and consider how the poets shape our responses.

We explore how Baudelaire, Whitman, Laforgue and Eliot were the first poets to express in detail both the exciting opportunities and the emotional and spiritual damage of life in the modern city. We will look in particular how Baudelaire’s poems and Laforgue’s translations of Whitman into French influenced Eliot’s early poetry, culminating in The Waste Land (1922).

Are there distinct qualities to the literature of each nation of the United Kingdom? How did Welshness, (Northern) Irishness, Scottishness and Englishness manifest themselves in writing of the second half of the twentieth century? Find out through the novels, poems and plays of Dylan Thomas, John Fowles, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Jackie Kay.

Publishing essays, poetry and autofiction across three decades, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, Audre Lorde was one of literature’s most radical thinkers. A self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother warrior, poet’, her writing sought to transform 'silence into language and action'.

This one day workshop provides a literary critique of some of Lorde’s key texts, and an opportunity to create new writing in response.

Read, view and discuss three dramas, focusing on the trajectory from play text to performance to better understand the playwrights and their impact on American and British theatre in the radically changing societies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Plays include: Awake and Sing! By Clifford Odets (1935), A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947) and The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan(1952).

What does it mean to be masculine in our technology-driven, hyper-virtual and ever divisive world today? Do ethnicity, race, culture and socio-economic factors intersect with masculinity's expression and construction? In this in-college taster session, all such question will be unpacked and answered when considering the representation of masculinity in the work of Inua Ellams and Caleb Azumah Nelson.

This one-day course examines how Yeats’ career spans three decades of experimentation. Tracking the development of the poet chronologically, selecting the greatest poems from each collection in turn, we shall discover the variety of his artistic output: love poet, lyric poet, balladeer, political poet, symbolist and elegist.

Considered the birth of the ‘Sensation’ novel, Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White (1860) continues to thrill us through vivid characters and compelling plot lines, while also raising important questions about identity - psychological, social, and legal - and power. We’ll be discussing extracts from the novel, alongside developing our understanding of its historical and literary contexts. We’ll also touch upon some of its screen afterlives.