The Death of Orpheus – workshop

Did twentieth century English poetry lose or gain by freeing itself from the
traditional poetic forms and conventions of earlier centuries?

During the early years of the twentieth century, English poets’ fondness for the traditional forms of poetry began to slip away. The horrors of war and the waste lands of broken civilisation did not fit easily into the soothing patterns of traditional metrical verse and rhyme. Telling the urgent truth became important. The democratisation of culture also played its part. Wordsworth’s belief that the poet was a man speaking to men rather than an elite practitioner of a high art seems to have come into its own. Did WB Yeats and John Betjeman mark the end of a poetic line? Workshop participants will explore these ideas through their own and other writers’ work.