This is the second 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:

• Session 2: Sonnets 5-8, facilitated by Julie Sutherland (on Zoom)
• Friday 28 March, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (UK) please note that the UK remains on GMT until 30 March but in North America clocks will already have moved forward by one hour
• £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!

In this Springtime study we will read T.S. Eliot’s groundbreaking modernist poem The Waste Land. Over the course of four weeks we will celebrate the poem’s complexity, dig into its intertextuality and (above all) observe how it resonates with us today.

Questions we might consider include: ‘How does this poem present modernity?’, ‘How does it explore the concepts of waste and the environment?’, ‘Is it a product of gritty realism or sublime mysticism?’ and, last but not least, ‘Why does it endure?’

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-week study on Zoom led by Karina Jakubowicz
• 7-28 April, Monday evenings 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• £120 for four two-hour meetings
• Schedule:
  7 April – Epigraph & The Burial of the Dead
  14 April – A Game of Chess
  21 April – The Fire Sermon
  28 April – Death by Water & What the Thunder Said

“Then on the centre of the shield itself

Through his extraordinary skill he fashioned

Numerous images as decoration.

On it he made the earth, the sky, the sea

The sun that never wearies, the full moon,

And all the wonderous stars that crown the sky-

The Pleiades, the Hyades, Orion

The mighty warrior, and the Great Bear,

Known as the Wagon, which revolves in place,

The only constellation never washed

By Ocean’s streams.”

In Book 18 of The Iliad, Achilles – devastated by the death of his beloved Patroclus – vows to take revenge on his killer, Hector, who has also stolen the armour that Patroclus had borrowed from him. Thetis, his mother, makes him promise not to return to battle until she has obtained a new set of armour from Hephaestus (Vulcan in Roman mythology). At her request the craftsman god creates an immortal set of armour with a stunning decorated shield.

In the middle of his epic poem Homer has set a description of the shield itself, creating one of the earliest examples of Ekphrasis, the use of a detailed account of a piece of art as a literary device. Achilles’ shield contains heaven and earth and two cities, one at peace and one at war, farmland with fields being ploughed and harvested, vineyards, cattle menaced by a lion, a wedding, and a man on trial for murder.  At the end of the passage Homer describes a group of young men and women dancing in the open air.  

Over the centuries this section of the Iliad has struck many readers and listeners with its beauty and the power of the images described.  It has been interpreted in many different ways and has inspired poets from Hesiod to W.H. Auden. 

As we look at these lines in detail, we will examine the elements that make it such a memorable description and consider ways in which it underlines the themes of the Iliad as a whole. 

This study is suitable for people who are not familiar with the Iliad as well as those who have already read the poem. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Wednesday 16 April, 6.00-8.00 pm BST
• £30 to include background materials and opening notes

This is the third 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:

• Session 3: Sonnets 9, 10 & 11, facilitated by Julie Sutherland (on Zoom)
• Wednesday 30 April, 6.00 – 8.00 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!

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

‘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