John Keats’s Ghost with Professor Nicholas Roe: The Lit and Phil

In this lecture Keats’s biographer will look at the nineteenth-century craze for séances by way of introducing the ghostly in Keats. His talk will range widely, from Borley Rectory to eerie effects in poetic language, rhyme and verse forms, and in some of Keats’s most famous poems. He will explore gothic horror in Isabella, and will speculate on how the ‘Nightingale Ode’ may be haunted by Virgil’s Aeneid and a desolate place ‘where no birds sing’. Nicholas Roe is Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews, a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and Chair of the Keats Foundation.

6pm