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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 2018 will be:

• 11 January
• 25 January
• 8 February
• 22 February
• 8 March
• 22 March
• 5 April
• 19 April
• 3 May
• 17 May
• 31 May
• June 1 4
• June 28
• July 12
• July 26
• Augst 9
• August 23
• Sept. 6
• Sept. 20
• October 4
• Oct. 18
• November 1
• Nov. 15
• Nov. 29
• December 13

Meetings for 2019 will be:

10 January
• 24 January
• 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
• Sept. 12
• October 10
• Oct. 24
• November 7
• Nov. 21
• December 5
• December 12

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  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

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

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  Web-site created by Roger Swaine.