The Poetry of Robert Graves 5 - 6 July 2007 A conference organised by the Institute of English Studies and the Robert Graves Society

A revaluation of the poetry of Robert Graves is long overdue. The aim of this conference is to make a significant contribution towards the academic and critical recognition of Graves 's poetic achievement.

Reviewing Vol. II of the Carcanet edition nearly a decade ago, Neil Powell wondered if Graves 's poems would 'at last prove to be the twentieth century's finest body of English lyric poetry'. Graves's entire poetic oeuvre is now available (including, since 2003, as a Penguin Classic); a number of books devoted wholly or in part to Graves's poetry have been published since D. N. G. Carter's landmark study of 1989; he is represented in such standard university anthologies as the Norton.

Yet Graves 's status within the British academic and intellectual domain is still relatively marginal. As Sean O'Brien put it, 'His poems are, for the moment, in a kind of administrative limbo'. In her 2004 Chatterton Lecture at the British Academy, Fran Brearton addressed some of the reasons for this neglect, among them Graves 's own efforts to pre-empt his readers' attitudes to his work. This conference seeks to take forward the discussion of Graves 's critical reception, and, through a range of approaches, to examine some of the defining qualities of his poetry, so as to affirm both its distinctive excellence and its centrality in the twentieth-century canon.

Speakers will include:
Professor Christopher Ricks (Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford); Dr Michael Basinski (Curator, The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo); Dr Robert J. Bertholf (State University of New York at Buffalo, editor of the poetry of Robert Duncan and Joel Oppenheimer); Dr Fran Brearton (Queen's University, Belfast, Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre); Catherine Hilliard, (Librarian, St John's College, Oxford); Professor Frank Kersnowski (formerly Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, author of The Early Poetry of Robert Graves (2002)); Professor Grevel Lindop, (formerly University of Manchester, poet and general editor of De Quincey's complete works and Graves's The White Goddess (1997)); Matthew Betts (University of York); Professor Paul O'Prey (Vice-Chancellor, Roehampton University, and editor of Graves's Selected Letters and Collected Writings on Poetry); Professor Dunstan Ward (University of London Institute in Paris, co-editor (with the poet's widow Beryl Graves) of Robert Graves's Complete Poems, and President of the Robert Graves Society).

Registration Fees:
£60 Standard; £40 Speakers/IES Members/Concessions/Members of the Robert Graves Society.

Enquiries and Registration: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk

CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN PDF FORMAT
CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN WORD FORMAT

Provisional Programme