Step into the vast cosmos of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in this immersive eight-week study. More than a poem, Milton’s epic is a world unto itself, one with vaulted heavens, smouldering hells and a fragile Eden. It presents a realm where every choice tips the balance of creation. This study invites curious minds to lose themselves in the epic’s grandeur and wrestle with the questions it refuses to let go: what does it mean to rebel? To obey? To be free? To fall?

Over eight two-and-a-half-hour sessions, we will traverse all twelve books of Paradise Lost, tracing Milton’s visions of angels in revolt, serpentine deceits, and humankind on the brink of catastrophe. Each week, close reading of key passages will spark lively conversation about the poem’s grand themes: freedom and fate, temptation and grace, the allure of evil, and the possibility of redemption. Along the way, we shall uncover the thunderous music and daring invention that defines Milton’s verse.

This study is as much about experience as analysis. Reading this great work aloud will enable us to feel the powerful rhythm, sharpen our thinking in the heat of dialogue, and discover together how a 17th-century poet still speaks to us with urgent clarity. Participants will not just read Paradise Lost. They will inhabit it, wrestle with it, and carry its fire forward.

Whether you come for epic storytelling, moral philosophy, or the sheer intoxication of language, this study promises a journey that is as challenging as it is exhilarating. Experience or rediscover Milton’s masterpiece and join us as we explore what it means to “awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-week study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Julie Sutherland
• Eight two-and-a-half-hour meetings, Tuesdays, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)
• 14 July – 1 September 2026
• £320 for eight meetings and background notes and resources
• We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

William Blake expressed his radical vision through illuminated books that combine poetry and art. We’ll study selections from some of his powerful early poems: Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Auguries of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While Blake’s poetry stands on its own and requires no background knowledge, encountering him is especially interesting after reading Dante or Milton. So, this study would be a fine next chapter for those who have previously studied Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy with the LitSalon. You can view some of Blake’s art and poetry here.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five meeting study led by Sean Forester
• Mondays, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (UK time), 7, 14, 21, 28 September and 5 October
• Please purchase facsimile editions of Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with Blake’s illuminated manuscripts in full colour. The texts are also available free online at the Blake Archive.
• £200 for five two-hour meetings

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

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

from Sonnet 94

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.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single two-hour meeting led by Dr Julie Sutherland on Zoom
• Thursday 17 September 2026, 5.00 – 7.00 pm (BST)
• Session #13 – Sonnets 91, 94 & 97
• £30.00 for two-hour study

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

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!

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Dante’s epic journey through the afterlife continues in the Purgatorio. Here the poet explores self-transformation: How do we let go of pride, hatred, lust, jealousy and greed? How can we move from cruelty and to kindness, from sin to salvation? 

Dante writes in the first person as a very human voyager, reacting with strong and varied emotions to the characters before him, just as the reader might. As we pass through an array of landscapes, each appropriate to the sins and purgations there, Dante undergoes a kind of transformation himself. And he challenges us to do the same. 

You don’t need to have read Dante’s Inferno to join this study. Dante, like Joyce, is an ideal author for in-depth study at the LitSalon. The Divine Comedy has multiple meanings that provide rich material for discussion, weaving together myth, theology, history and the contemporary life of Dante’s time. We will explore Dante’s relationship with Virgil and Beatrice, and with several other vivid personalities he meets along his way.  

According to T.S. Eliot, “The whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it.” Join us in reading one of the classics of world literature. You will be welcome to use whichever translation of Dante you prefer, but Sean will be using the translation by D.M. Black, whose notes and commentary are especially focused on the Purgatorio’s implications for psychological self-transformation.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eleven meeting study (on Zoom) led by Sean Forester
• Thursdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time)
• 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 October; 5, 12, 19 November; 3, 10, 17 December 2026 (N.B. no meeting on 26 November, Thanksgiving)
• £440 for eleven two-hour meetings, to include opening notes and resources
• Recommended edition: Dante’s Purgatorio, translated by Jean Hollander & Robert Hollander, ISBN: 978-0385497008