Clarendon Lecture Series May 2023: Lecture 1 (17 May)

The 2023 Clarendon Lecture series will be given by Professor Susan Stewart (Princeton University) on 'Poetry's Nature'.

This is the first lecture in the series and will be on the theme of "The Bird in Glee": On the Non-semantic.

The other lectures in the series will take place on the following dates:

18 May 2023: The Seasons: Paradigm of Lyric Time*

23 May 2023: Motion and Turn: Ways of Water**

24 May 2023: The Imperceptible, or Wilderness

*For the second lecture, could attendees please read/re-read William Cowper's "Yardley Oak."

**For the third lecture, could attendees please read/re-read Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc"

Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, is a poet, critic, and translator. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American poets, she is the author of six books of poems, including Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her many prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, The Poet’s Freedom, and The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. 

The Clarendon Lectures are published by Oxford University Press in print and electronic form, so that they can be enjoyed by readers for years to come. You can browse the publications on the OUP website.