Chatterton Lectures on Poetry

The Chatterton Lecture is given by an early-career scholar, on the life and works of a deceased poet who had written in the English language. The lecture series was established through a bequest from E H W Meyerstein, and named after the poet Thomas Chatterton. It was first delivered in 1955.

2022 Thomas Chatterton: four ways of literary terra-forming, by Nick Groom (text)

2018 ‘I should want nothing more’: Edward Thomas and simplicity, by Guy Cuthbertson (text | audio)

2016 Elizabeth Melville and the poetics of desire in early modern Britain, by Kylie Murray (audio)

2014 ‘Curse, bless, me now’: Dylan Thomas and Saunders Lewis, by Tudur Hallam (text | audio)

2012 Edward Lear’s lines of flight, Matthew Bevis (text | video)

2011 Pope’s Ethical Thinking: Passion and Irony in Dialogue, by Christopher Tilmouth (text | audio)

2010 ‘Where the Night Still Hangs Like a Half-Folded Bat’: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence, by Santanu Das (text | audio)

2009 Donne, By Hand, by Tom Lockwood (text | audio)

2008 Auden Unparadized, by Seamus Perry (text | audio)

2007 ‘But I, that knew what harbred in that hed’: Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Posthumous ‘Interpreters’, by Cathy Shrank (text)

2006 A. E. Housman's Rejected Addresses, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (text | audio)

2005 Byron, Conversation and Discord, by Jane Stabler (text)

2004 Robert Graves and The White Goddess, by Fran Brearton (text | audio)

2003 Michael Drayton’s Brilliant Career, by Andrew Hadfield (text | audio)

2002 Robert Burns and British Poetry, by Murray G H Pittock (text)

2001 ‘I see men as trees suffering’: The Vision of Keith Douglas, by Tim Kendall (text)

2000 Waiting for God: John Milton's Poems of 1671, by Margaret Kean (text)

1999 ‘Trafficking with Merchants for His Soul’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Among the Aesthetes, by Josephine M Guy (text)

1998 ‘Courtesie is fatal’: The Civil and Visionary Poetics of Andrew Marvell, by Nigel Smith (text)

1997 Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems, by Colin Burrow (text)

1996 Yeats and Remorse, by Peter McDonald (text)

1995 ‘Servant, but not Slave’: Ben Jonson at the Jacobean Court, by Martin Butler (text)

1994 ‘The glow-worm’s 96 per cent efficiency’: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry of Knowledge, by Robert Crawford (text)

1992 Dryden’s Past, by Eric Griffiths (text)

1991 Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile, by Richard A McCabe (text)

1990 Edmund Spenser: Art and The Faerie Queene, by Michael Leslie (text)

1989 Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History, by R F Foster (text)

1988 Thomas Carew, by John Kerrigan (text)

1987 Whitman: The Civil War Poems, by D R Karlin (text)

1986 From Medieval to Renaissance? Chaucer’s Position on Past Gentility, by A J Minnis (text)

1985 Richard Lovelace and the Uses of Obscurity, by Gerald Hammond (text)

1984 Elizabeth Bishop, by Andrew Motion (text)

1983 The Bravery of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by Elizabeth Cook (text)

1982 Yeats’s Late Plays: ‘A High Grave Dignity and Strangeness’, by Richard Allen Cave (text)

1981 The Fabric of Dryden’s Verse, by Richard Luckett (text)

1980 Philip Sidney’s Toys, by Katherine Duncan-Jones (text)

1979 Poetry and the Computer: Some Quantitative Aspects of the Style of Sylvia Plath, by C S Butler (text)

1978 Kipling’s Magic Art, by Jacqueline S Bratton (text)

1977 T. S. Eliot: Language, Sincerity and the Self, by John Casey (text)

1976 Carving Trifles: William King’s Imitation of Horace, by John Fuller (text)

1975 The Poetry of the Early Waverley Novels, by Claire Lamont (text)

1974 The Fire i’ the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Seamus Heaney (text)

1973 The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of the Self, by Roger Lonsdale (text)

1972 Donne: A London Poet, by Barbara Everett (text)

1971 The Performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, by Nigel Alexander (text)

1970 Wilfred Owen, by Jon Stallworthy (text)

1969 William Wordsworth 1770–1969, by Jonathan Wordsworth (text)

1968 Pope and Dulness, by Emrys Jones (text)

1967 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, by Anne Righter (text)

1966 Tennyson’s Methods of Composition, by Christopher Ricks (text)

1965 Some Aspects of Kipling’s Verse, by Andrew Rutherford (text)

1964 Milton, Lost and Regained, by John Beer (text)

1963 W. B. Yeats: Poet and Crank, by Laurence Lerner (text)

1962 Keats and Reality, by John Bayley (text)

1961 The Poetry of Sir Walter Scott, by Donald Davie (text)

1960 Oliver St. John Gogarty, by A Norman Jeffares (text)

1959 Gerard Manley Hopkins: an Idiom of Desperation, by John Wain

1958 Skelton, by John Holloway

1957 Byron as Poet, by W W Robson

1956 Keith Douglas: A Poet of the Second World War, by G S Fraser

1955 E H W Meyerstein, 1889-1952, by Lionel Butler 

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