Warton Lecture on English Poetry, delivered by Professor Andrea Brady, on 25 April 2017 (venue: The British Academy)

‘Love is not love’ when love is a poem. And yet most poems are persuasions to love; and poetry is a kind of love-making: ‘that is poetry really loving the name of anything.’ What can the repetitions of lyric tell us about love?  If artistic remembrance ‘spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence of joy’, how can remembering love help us to determine our future? In a year of ordinary disasters, this lecture will explore a tradition of ancient and modern love poetry to affirm its impossible fiction: that we shall have everything we want and there will be no more dying.

About the speaker:
Andrea Brady's books of poetry include The Strong Room (2016), Dompteuse (2014), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability (2012), and Wildfire (2010). She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now. 

The lecture was chaired by Professor Isobel Armstrong FBA, Birkbeck, University of London

The determination of love, by Andrea Brady - Warton Lectures on English Poetry

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