EMAIL BULLETIN
To have advance information about events organised by the Academy delivered directly to your inbox, please subscribe to our email bulletin
MISSED AN EVENT?
Some of our events are available to dlownload as podcasts from our media library, so you may be able to listen to the event you missed online (please allow a few days after the event for the audio files to be uploaded).
Location of the British Academy
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Nearest tube: Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus
Buses: Piccadilly Circus, Lower Regent Street, Haymarket, Trafalgar Square
Contact the Events Office
020 7969 5246
events@britac.ac.uk
Room hire
020 7969 5218
experience@britac.ac.uk
'The Reason of this Preference':
Sleeping, Flowing and Freezing in Pope's Dunciad
The 2010 Warton Lecture on English Poetry, given by Dr Valerie Rumbold
5.30pm, Tuesday 4 May 2010
British Academy, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
This lecture begins by concentrating on a small building block from one of Pope's major poems, and then moves outward to explore what it might tell us more generally about his work. When Samuel Johnson was collecting material for his life of Pope, one of his informants claimed to be able to identify for him 'the couplet by which he [i.e. Pope] declared his own ear to be most gratified'. The couplet, from The Dunciad, depicts the Sea of Azov, and the river that flows into it. Johnson quoted it, and noted 'But the reason of this preference I cannot discover'. By focusing on the process through which Pope shaped this couplet we can not only sharpen our appreciation of this one small unit, but also develop insights into the wider significance of its structure and themes for Pope's work more generally.
About the Speaker
Dr Valerie Rumbold held posts at Jesus College, Cambridge; St Hilda's College, Oxford, and the University of Wales, Bangor, before coming to the University of Birmingham in 1998. Her 1989 study Women's Place in Pope's World was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. In 1999 she published an edition of The Dunciad in Longman's Annotated Texts and since then has collaborated on Longman's multi-volume The Poems of Alexander Pope, publishing Volume 3 in 2007. She is currently working on a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the works of Jonathan Swift.
The Warton Lecture on English Poetry
The Warton Lecture on English Poetry was endowed by Mrs Frida Mond in 1910 (with the Shakespeare Lecture). In a letter to the Academy's Secretary, Sir Israel Gollancz, she asked that an annual lecture be given as a tribute to Thomas Warton, 'the first historian of English poetry, whose work not only led the way to the scientific study of English Literature, but also stimulated creative genius, and played no small part in the Romantic Revival'.
Lecture
5.30–6.30pm, followed by a reception.
Registration is not required for this event. Seats will be allocated on arrival.