THS London Lecture 2021 - Professor Mark Ford

Thomas Hardy Society London Lecture 2021

Professor Mark Ford (University College London)

Four Poems about London by Hardy: 'Coming up Oxford Street: Evening', 'The Broken Appointment', 'In St Paul's a While Ago', 'The Woman I Met'

Saturday 4th December at 4pm

University College London – English Department Common Room

The Thomas Hardy Society are deleted to welcome Professor Mark Ford as our guest speaker for the 2021 London Lecture. His talk will explore Hardy's depictions of various sites and encounters in four poems about London. It will pay particular attention to the biographical contexts of each poem, as well as to their use of genre and form.

Mark Ford has published widely on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century British, American, and French literature. He is particularly interested in the work of the New York School of Poets and has published editions of the poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. He is also interested in French literature and is the leading Anglophone expert on the work of Raymond Roussel. Subjects of recent essays by Mark Ford include Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Nicholas Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Georges Perec, Javier Marìas, Bob Dylan, Vladimir Nabokov, A.E. Housman and Philip Larkin. He is one of the literary executors of the poet Mick Imlah and has edited a volume of Imlah's Selected Poems for Faber & Faber. He has also recorded (with Seamus Perry of Oxford University) a highly-acclaimed series of Podcasts on 20th-century poetry for the London Review of Books. Poets discussed by Ford and Perry include Adrienne Rich, Stevie Smith, Robert Lowell, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney.