Unknowing lyric

• Long Nineteenth Century research seminar

Speaker: Dr Matthew Bevis (Keble College, Oxford)

Venue: Law Building, Room 111

Abstract

Although we confidently talk about lyric poems as though they were objects of knowledge, on closer inspection it’s not entirely clear that we know what we’re talking about. This talk thinks about how lyrics explore--and encourage--various forms of unknowingness. I'll be looking at both American and English poets across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Dorothy Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Hardy, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others) and wondering about how vocabularies of 'wonder' might shed light on the experience of reading modern poetry.