Poetry Courses
Study online or in London

In celebration of Windrush Day, join us for a lively celebration of Benjamin Zephaniah, one of Britain’s most dynamic poets! This short, interactive course explores his life, his fiery poetry and the themes which make his work resonant today. Through readings, discussion and performance, you’ll get a real sense of why Zephaniah’s words continue to inspire.

We will explore how poets changed during the 20th century from writing in formal ‘poetic’ language and regular forms towards writing in more natural language, freer forms and with more direct expression of feelings. We will look at free verse, political poetry, the Beat Poets, confessional poetry and prose poetry.

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? High art or doggerel, what does it matter once the bombs start to fall?

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).

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.