Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was, quipped one critic, Portugal’s three greatest modern poets. To read Pessoa is not just to read one poet but to enter into a whole literature. 

Pessoa’s attempt to forge a new literary modernism for Portugal took shape through his creation of different literary personas. He called these personas ‘heteronyms’, to distinguish them from pseudonyms, as essentially distinct personalities with biographies, literary styles and philosophical and political ideas as different from each other as from Pessoa himself.

Pessoa authored works under at least 72 different names throughout his life, and this compulsion seems to have been both an aesthetic and a psychological necessity. At the centre of his most important and accomplished literary achievements is the poetry authored by the three main heteronyms – Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis; by Pessoa himself as one of that company of heteronyms; and his great prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, authored by the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares.

Over five meetings we will take a sample of work from each of Pessoa’s heteronyms as a general introduction to the work – and the literary universe – of Fernando Pessoa. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six-week introductory study led by Desma Lawrence
• Tuesdays, 12.00-2.00 pm (UK), 13 May to 17 June 2025
• £180 for six-session study, to include opening notes and resources

Four Quartets (1943) was written at the end of T.S. Eliot’s poetic career and is considered by some to be his greatest work. The Four Quartets reflects the four seasons and the four elements, with each section having its own attendant landscape. These include the gardens of Burnt Norton, the open fields of East Coker, the small group of rocks that make up The Dry Salvages, and the village of Little Gidding. All of these spaces reflect facets of England in the 1940s while also serving as Eliot’s internal environment, a place where he wrestles with the themes of death, nature and time. The backdrop of the Second World War adds an eerie pertinence to Eliot’s musings as he contemplates his own demise, yet the poem is rarely despairing. ‘What we call the beginning is often the end,’ he states, ‘And to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from.’

Contrary to Eliot’s suggestion, we will start at the beginning and work our way to the end (perhaps to look back on the beginning with new eyes). The study takes place over four weeks every Monday with a break in the middle:

26 May: Burnt Norton
2 June: East Coker
9 June – break, no meeting
16 June: The Dry Salvages
23 June: Little Gidding

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study led by Karina Jakubowicz on Zoom
• Mondays, 26 May – 23 June (with no meeting on 9 June), 6.00-8.00 pm (BST)
• £130 for four two-hour meetings
• Please use this link to share details

‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes)‘

From Song of Myself (1892)

American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) forever changed the literary landscape of his own time and influenced generations of readers and poets who followed (William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and Fernando Pessoa, to name a few). Whitman startles us with his radical rejection of tradition together with an uncontained celebration of love, friendship, democracy and nature.

How can we, in our challenging times, connect to Whitman’s passionate and thunderous celebration of man and nature? Can his poetry add depth to our own dismay at war, climate emergency and ailing democracy? Can it offer us a literary way forward?

The summer of 2025 seems exactly the right time to be reading Whitman. His poetry is irresistible both for its oceanic lust for life and its unshakable freedom.

In this introductory study we will explore selections from two of Whitman’s iconic ‘songs’, in which his enthusiastic voice and powerful verse speak directly to us, beckoning us to join him on his poetic road.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four two-hour meetings led by Vivien Kogut
• £120 for four meetings, to include opening notes and resources
• Wednesdays, 4-25 June, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK)

  • 4 June: Song of Myself
  • 11 June: Song of Myself
  • 18 June: Song of the Open Road
  • 25 June: Song of the Open Road

The poet Sappho was so revered by the Ancient Greeks that Plato called her the Tenth Muse, and so famous that her image appeared on coins. She was admired for her technical virtuosity and development of the lyric form but also her emotional honesty – speaking directly to the reader with the intimacy of simple speech. Although mainly fragments of her poems have survived, some only a few lines long, her influence and esteem remain to this day. 

Hymn to Aphrodite is the only poem by Sappho known to be complete. Over seven stanzas it contains an invocation to Aphrodite and a plea for help in securing the love of the woman who has so far spurned her.  Passionate and at times ambiguous, the reader is left wondering if the goddess of love’s intervention will be of any help at all. 

Through repeated readings, analysis and discussion we will work towards an understanding of Sappho’s legacy and enduring appeal.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study led by Caroline Hammond
• Wednesday 4 June 2025, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (BST)
• £30 to include background materials and opening notes
• Please use this link to share details

This is the fourth in a series of single session studies on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Participants are welcome to join as few or many sessions as they please.

‘There is not a part of the writings of this Poet wherein is found in equal compass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed.’

William Wordsworth on Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets have inspired, fascinated and disturbed readers for centuries. Full of mystery and imagination, they dazzle us even as they drive us mad: Who is the fair youth to whom so many of these sonnets are addressed? Who is the dark lady, the complex beloved of so many others? Who is the rival poet and what power does he possess? Are these lyric expressions of tortured love – among other themes – the key to understanding the mysterious life of Shakespeare, or are they not autobiographical at all?

Through close analysis and hands-on interpretive work, we will examine Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic exploration of his speaker’s romantic and tortured feelings and experiences.

We are offering these self-contained, individual studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a workshop style setting. Over time we will cover all of the 154 sonnets that comprise Shakespeare’s celebrated sequence. Participants are invited to join as few or many sessions as they please.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Share details of this study using this link
• Session 4: Sonnets 12, 13 & 14, facilitated by Julie Sutherland (on Zoom)
• Sunday 15 June, 3.00 – 5.00 pm (UK)
• £25 for two-hour study
• Before the session, Julie Sutherland will send links to online versions or attach specific copies for discussion. It is highly recommended that you print these off before joining this hands-on session. If you have a printed edition, please also have it ready so we can consider variations between texts. Have a notebook and pencil on hand as well!

Composed on 30 May 1887, Hopkins called The Windhover “the best thing I ever wrote” and, since its publication it has been celebrated for its daring, innovative language and stunningly accurate evocation of a kestrel in mid-flight. The intensity of the poem’s rhythm and experimental use of form still has the ability to startle us with its freshness and anticipates the work of modernist poets on whom Hopkins was a major influence. The powerful “sprung rhythm” meter makes it a challenging but very satisfying poem to read aloud.

Over the course of two hours we will study The Windhover in depth, look at its form and construction and, through repeated readings, unlock the secrets of this acclaimed poem. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study led by Caroline Hammond
• Wednesday 18 June, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (BST)
• £30 to include background materials and opening notes
• Please use this link to share details

The Iliad is one of the first written works in Western Literature, and undoubtedly one of the greatest. Although the story of its composition and recording remains a subject of scholarly debate, we can tentatively date it to the late 8^th or early 7^th Century BCE. It is impossible to overestimate The Iliad’s importance, which extends beyond literature to influence art, culture, society and morals – Alexander the Great carried the copy given to him by Aristotle on his campaigns and John Keats was inspired to write one of his most perfect sonnets after a night of reading. 

The Iliad is a thrilling and heart-wrenching poem about war, human mortality and loss. But it is also about friendship, families, the natural world, love and redemption. One of the joys of the work, and perhaps why re-reading is so rewarding, is the richness and relatability of Homer’s world. Richness takes many forms, including a huge cast of characters, vivid language and similes, and how invested we become in this epic story. Homer invites us into a world that is both familiar and strange. The society is patriarchal, slave-holding, monarchical and polytheistic. The text is more than two and a half thousand years old, yet the characters speak directly to our own experience. Who hasn’t feared for a loved one? Or been mad at their boss (hopefully not enough to almost draw a sword against them)? Or wondered at the beauty of the sunrise?

This year we’ll also be bringing an environmental lens to our reading. We’ll discuss ways The Iliad may have contributed to the current climate crisis. Whether the work includes warnings and an awareness of the dangers of environmental damage. And how we might use this knowledge to drive change.  

Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad was published to acclaim in 2023.

“Wilson’s approachable storytelling tone invites us in, only to startle us with eruptions of beauty… Wilson’s transformation of such a familiar and foundational work is astonishing.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Atlantic

Using iambic pentameter – the rhythm of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton – Wilson’s translation has the lyrical quality the Ancient Greeks would have experienced in a work so closely linked to performance. Her writing is brisk and readable, bringing a fresh perspective to an ancient tale.

We will combine a close reading of the text and bonus features: poems and art inspired by the epic, consideration of the psychology of war, and images of museum exhibits. We’ll also draw on Edith Hall’s new book Epic of the Earth (ISBN 978-0-300-27558-2) but it’s not necessary either to have a copy or to have read this in advance of the study.

The study is offered in two six-week sections. The first six sessions covering books 1-12 will be followed by a two-week break and then six sessions for the final 12 books.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Section 1: Six two-hour meetings on Zoom, from 6-8pm (UK) on consecutive Tuesdays from 9 September to 14 October led by Caroline Hammond and Susanna Taggart.  Following a two-week break there will be a further six two-hour meetings on Zoom, from 6-8pm (UK) on consecutive Tuesdays from 4 November to 9 December.
• We’ll use Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Iliad (ISBN-10: 1324076143 ; ISBN-13: 978-1324076148).
• £210 for the first six meetings with two facilitators (participants in Section 1 will be given priority when the second set is posted for booking) to include opening notes and resources.
• Please use this link to share details of the study.

After Dante Alighieri’s death his family discovered that the final thirteen cantos of his Divine Comedy were missing. They searched for months and began to fear the great epic poem would never be published. But then, according to Boccaccio, Dante appeared to his son Jacopo in a dream. Clad in radiant white, the poet led his son to the house in Ravenna where he had lived in exile and pointed to a place on the wall. When Jacopo awoke, he went straight to the spot his father had shown him and found the missing cantos hidden behind the wall. 

These final cantos describe Dante’s magnificent mystical vision of the afterlife awaiting virtuous souls. In the view of the translator and scholar Robert Hollander, “Dante’s Paradiso is surely one of the most daring poetic initiatives we have. . . . Theology set to music, as it were, it pushes its reader (not to mention its translators) to the limit.”

Our LitSalon group has read Inferno and Purgatorio, and we now move to Paradiso, but new readers are also welcome to join the journey. Why not begin with Dante’s heaven before descending into his hell? We hope to offer Inferno again in January 2026.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight meeting study of Paradiso, the third and final part of Dante’s Divine Comedy led by Sean Forester on Zoom
• Sundays, 4.00-6.00 pm (UK), 12, 19, 26  October & 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 November 2025
• You can use any translation of Dante that you prefer, although Sean recommends:  Paradiso: A Verse Translation by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-1400031153.
• £240 for eight two-hour meetings, to include background notes and additional resources.
• Use this link to share details of the study.
• The next cycle of The Divine Comedy will begin in January 2026 with Inferno (12 meetings) followed by Purgatorio in Spring 2026 (10 meetings).