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A Passion for Poetry

Speaker(s): Malcolm Guite
Date: Summer 2017
Length: 14h 58m
Product ID: RGDL4726S

Description

Gain a practical and spiritual foundation for engaging joyfully, creatively, and fruitfully with poetry. Learn to appreciate the different kind of reading poetry invites, the kinds of pleasure it gives, and the way it teaches. Go beyond the bare words to consider the spiritual as well as the literary impact of each poem, ultimately learning how poetry relates to and may even nurture faith.

A) What is Poetry? Let's ask the poets. This introductory session will enable the group to share their own present understanding and expectations of poetry and also to engage with a series of different ways in which famous poets have tried to express what is at the heart of poetry, including definitions from Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Eliot

B) A New Kind of Reading: Five Practical Ways into Poetry This session will open up five ways in which poetry works on and in the reader and help us to be sensitive and alert to each of the poems. These are Tasting the Words, Echo and Counterpoint, Images and Allusion, Ambiguity and Ambivalence, and Perspective and Paradox.

C) Poetic Form 1: Exploring Metre and Rhyme This session will explain the basics of poetic form, including metre and rhyme and specifically help students to recognize and feel the standard poetic line of iambic pentameter' as well as alternatives like Hopkins, sprung rhythm. It will also look at the effect of different rhyme schemes, and alternatively of blank verse, and the special effects achieved by enjambment, half rhyme and variations in line length. Examples from Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson and Hopkins

D) Poetic Form 2: Sonnets, Sestinas and Villanelles Continuing on from yesterday's session, this session will look at three specific poetic forms and show how different poets have succeeded in using them to different effects, as a way of exploring the relationship between form and meaning. This will include some reflection on my own poetry as well as poems by Shakespeare, Shelley, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas

E) The Word Made Flesh: Poetry and our life in Christ Drawing on all the threads of the week's work this session will show how reading poetry can deepen our spiritual lives and help us to understand even more the way poetry can help us enter into the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection for us and for the world.

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