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The University of the Third Age - Welwyn Hatfield

Poetry Study Group

Meetings are held on alternate Thursday mornings, from 10:30am to 12:30pm, at 13 South Ley, Welwyn Garden City AL7 4JP

Group Leader: Hazel Bell, 01707 265201; hkb@aidanbell.com

Each meeting of the group is themed: for example, the poems read at the session could be about ageing, nations, seasons or the work of a particular poet or poets. We each select and read our chosen poems at the meetings, for group discussion.

Meetings for 2019 will be:

10 January - Hardy, Herrick, & Housman
• 24 January - American Poetry
• 7 February
• 21 February
• 8 March
• 21 March
• 4 April
• 25 April
• 9 May
• 23 May
• 6 June
• June 20
• July 4
• July 18
• August 1
• August 15
• August 29
• September 12
• October 10
• October 24
• November 7
• November 21
• December 5
• December 12

Past subjects

2011

• Milton, Donne
• Bible, favourites
• Emily Dickinson
• Elizabeth Jennings
• G Mackay Brown
• Pat McMahon
• Norman Mackay
• Louis McNeice
• Love and betrayal
• Trees/fruit
• Yeats
• Autumn
• love
• war (abroad)
• age
• animals
• winter, Christmas

2012

• Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes
• ships, boats
• love
• travel
• Laurie Lee, Christina Rossetti
• Rudyard Kipling, Maya Angelou
• G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc
• Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen
• mountains, lakes
• Irish poets
• dwellings, buildings
• poems with names of real people
• women
• Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas
• John Clare, children
• music, singing
• animals
• Under Milk Wood
• people
• Longfellow & Philip Larkin
• Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke
• Thomas Hardy, favourites
• Christmas, travel

2013

• winter, seasons
• mythology, heroes
• all creatures great and small
• Spring
• foreign poems
• dwellings
• humorous / funereal
• professions
• Tennyson, T S Eliot
• Algernon Swinburne, W. H. Auden
• Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling
• William Shakespeare
• Matthew Arnold
• Robert Graves
• Ezra Pound
• John Betjeman
• Louis McNiece
• Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson
• Seamus Heaney
• Kahlil Gibran, William Blake
• Walter de la Mere. R. S. Thomas
• S. T. Coleridge - Christabel
• War
• Female poets
• Christmas

2014

• Tennyson - The Coming of Arthur
• Gerard Manley Hopkins & Norman McCaig
• Favourite poems
• Milton - Paradise Lost (Book 1)
• Yeats
• The Mersey Group
• A.E. Housman, Walter de la Mare
• Derek Walcott
• Swinburne, Andrew Motion
• John Donne (CD of his love poems)
• Metaphysical poets
• Journeys
• Nostalgia / Fruit
• Celebration
• Nations
• Landscapes
• Cities
• War and Peace
• The 4 elements
• Freedom and persecution

2015

• T. S. Eliot
• Modernism
• sonnets
• Spring and Easter
• water
• human habitation
• Pope and the Augustans
• the pursuit of love
• characters and craftsmen
• Kings, Queens heroes and magic
• places
• North America (US & Canada)
• colour and treasure
• Autumn
• Scottish poets

2016

• Transport
• Friendship
• Norman McCaig / animal kingdom
• poems with names in
• relatives (extended family)
• Royalty
• heat and cold
• youth and age
• mountains and seas
• delight and despair
• journeys
• poems written in the first person
• cities, towns and villages
• sleep and dreams
• colourful characters
• ends and beginnings
• rivers and brooks
• sailors and sailing
• food and drink, taste and smell
• gardens
• winter
• time

2017

• Getting from here to there
• Childhood and childish things
• The letter 'M': subject matter - e.g. Moors, Magic or Mystery; or in the title - e.g. Maud, Memoriam; or some significant word within the poem.
• The end of Winter and the beginning of Spring
• Sun, moon, stars and the heavens
• Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Alun Lewis
• Birth and renewal
• People
• Ireland, Scotland and Wales
• Walter de la Mare
• Summer
• Poets or poems beginning with the letter R
• Artifacts
• Communication: language, writing, poetry, books
• Prayer and Worship
• journeys and travel
• animals
• nostalgia
• colours
• farming
• Seamus Heaney
• water

2018

• memories
• landscape
• birds
• adventure
• 19c women poets
• wildlife
• narrative poems
• anonymous poems
• childhood and adolescence
• ghosts
• comic poetry
• music
• war and peace
• town and country
• poetic effects
• death
• colours
• wind and storm
• “found” poems
• ships and sailors
• illumination
• visual imagery
• war
• Christmas, frost and snow

Click here to see a Youtube video of a poetry group meeting.