‘Between the Downs and the Sea: Romantics in Sussex’
By Alexandra Harris, author of Weatherlands: Writers and Artists under English Skies, and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination, from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.
‘Nothing worth speaking of’ happened on Keats’s 1819 excursion over the South Downs to Chichester and then to Bedhampton – nothing except most of The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark. William Blake referred to his Sussex years as a ‘slumber on the banks of the ocean’, but it was a fruitful sleep in which Chichester appeared as a version of Jerusalem. William Collins, who spent most of his life in Chichester, catches the music of his ‘native plains’ in some of his most influential odes. This lecture will consider Keats and his predecessors in this small part of Sussex, and will explore more broadly the relationship between place and poetry.
Alexandra Harris will speak on Saturday 7 March 2020 at 5 pm.
For more details, visit the Keats House website.
Source:: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=2746