A Study Day led by Professor Matthew Campbell, York University

Matthew Campbell has been Professor of Modern Literature at University of York since 2011. Current projects include a History of Irish Poetry from Charlotte Brooke to Seamus Heaney, and research developed out of published and forthcoming essays on rhyme in contemporary poetry, traditional music and verse, and the poetry of Mangan, Joyce and Yeats. 

Matthew Campbell writes:

In 1996 Seamus Heaney wrote to Ted Hughes after attending mass in Santiago de Compostela about the huge collapse that has taken place at the centre of the Christian thing’. Even so, he went on to say that his memory of belief presented itself as a sort of mourning for what was lost: ‘the whole underlife of my childhood and teens rallied and wept for itself.’

These talks will look at Irish poetry as it skirts around its various beliefs. They will not just be about the nostalgia for rite and ritual evident in Heaney‘s letter to Hughes – a sort of post-Christianity. But they will also be about the Christian Ireland of sectarian divideness, not to mention the heterodox views of poets like Yeats, the residual paganism of Irish Christianity, the place of mythological and even fairy belief, and the strange pantheism that has returned in some recent ecological writing.

The talks will above all be focused on actual poems, which will be available in handout and on-line. The poems will be about questions as much as actual beliefs, and some of their questioning might contain difficult, heterodox material. But this will all be in the spirit of what it is to work in the tradition of a poetry of belief, as the Catholic modernist Brian Coffey put it: ‘when one is a religious poet, one is in the position of someone who is answering questions about themselves as well as they can.’

There will be three talks of about 40 minutes, with a break for lunch after the second.

Talk 1. Strange Gods: What did Yeats actually believe?
Talk 2. Irish Poets in the Confessional State: from Croagh Patrick to censorship
Talk 3. ‘The huge collapse in the Christian thing’: the sacred and the secular in contemporary Irish poetry.

Those attending in person are invited to bring a packed lunch or to use local retail outlets during the lunch break.

Speaker’s Handouts for the event provide access to poems and will be made available to ticket holders.

• For those unable to attend who wish to watch online or recordings later, links will be sent to ‘online’ ticket holders
• We only record the talks themselves, and not associated Q&As, discussions, or images of the live audience.

The event will be held at the Church of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford.

Please select the type of ticket you require and the number by using the + and – buttons below.