WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY

Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson

Professor Angela Leighton FBA, University of Hull

6 November 2002

This lecture is about form in poetry. It will consider how a number of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Anne Stevenson, among others, allow form to play against the sense of a work. In particular, it will look at how elegiac texts evoke a formal feeling over and above what they seem to be about. It will try to suggest some ways in which a critical formalism might enjoy this extra, without losing its historical or ideological bearings. The question 'what is a poem?' lurks at the bottom of the argument, and provides the counterweight to my raising, by implication, once again, the related question 'what is criticism?'

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