Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

An acclaimed expert on the life of John Keats will deliver a public lecture in the Old College, Aberystwyth, tonight, Wednesday 19 October 2016. Professor Nicholas Roe from the University of St Andrews will give a talk on ‘John Keats’s Ghosts’. Professor Roe is the author of ‘John Keats: A New Life’ which was descibed in the Sunday Times as “a remarkable achievement, authoritative and imaginative to a degree that should make all future Keats biographers quail." All are welcome to attend this free event which is being organised by the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, in association with the New Life for Old College project. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley, Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination at Aberystwyth University, said: “One of the world’s most influential Keats scholars, Nicholas Roe invites us to look again, and differently, at this most apparently familiar of poets. “Whether revealing the deep involvement of John Keats...

Archive discoveries by researchers at Aberystwyth University suggest that lying beneath the autumnal mellowness of one of the nation’s best-loved poems, John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”, is a murkier world of banking crisis, rising prices and striking workers. The previously unseen documents also suggest that the traditional site of the famous “stubble-plains” in “To Autumn” should be revised.  Long believed to describe the picturesque water-meadows lining the River Itchen, Keats’s cornfields are more likely, the researchers argue, to portray the west-facing slopes of St Giles’s Hill, overlooking Winchester from its eastern extremity. Generations of fans swooning along the "Keats Walk" may have been lead - literally - up the garden path by previous scholarly studies. When Keats arrived in Winchester in summer 1819, he did so in the midst of rising tensions over corn prices and agricultural working conditions.  Bankers-turned-landowners were snapping up grain-producing land in W...