Keats Foundation talk – Keats in Four Dimensions: Porphyro’s Ancient Ditty

6:30pm, Thursday, 23 November 2023, Keats House, Hampstead.

Tickets will be available from Keats House’s Eventbrite on 20 October, 5pm UK time. Click here to purchase.

This talk explores the shape of two of John Keats’s major poems, The Eve of St Agnes and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. In it, Professor Richard Marggraf-Turley discusses fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between Keats’s famous romance and ballad, drawing on the Klein bottle as a model for understanding the surprising ways in which the two poems are connected to themselves and each other.

Richard Marggraf-Turley is professor of English literature at Aberystwyth University. He has published widely on the Romantic poets, including Keats’s Boyish Imagination (2004), Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (2009), and as editor, Keats’s Places (2018). In 2007, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Richard is author of three volumes of poetry and a novel set in London of 1810, The Cunning House (2015). He is currently writing on text and topology – the shape of poems – on which this talk at Keats House draws.