I completed my BA at the University of Bristol and went on to study for an MPhil in European Romanticism at Glasgow and Bologna. After completing my PhD at Cambridge I held lectureships at Sheffield (2001) and York (2005). I joined Keble in 2011.
My first book, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce, examined relations between political oratory and literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. Comedy: A Very Short Introduction explored comedy as a literary genre and as a range of non-literary impulses and events (pantomime, circus, stand-up acts, caricatures, and other funny business). Wordsworth’s Fun was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019 (more information and reviews are available here).
Much of my recent work focuses on poetry: essays include ‘Poetry by Numbers‘, ‘Unknowing Lyric‘, ‘In Search of Distraction‘, and ‘Some Birds‘. For more information about various series and initiatives, see Poetry at Keble.
I’m currently completing two books: Then Again: Notes on Wonder (for Harvard University Press) and Knowing Edward Lear (for Oxford University Press). The latter builds on a volume I co-edited with James Williams, Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry. Research for this project has involved collaborations with the BBC, Harvard, the Natural History Museum, the Ashmolean, and the Institute of Art and Ideas. More information — along with video podcasts, online exhibitions, talks, and other materials — can be found here.
In 2022 I curated an exhibition at the IKON gallery: Edward Lear, Moment to Moment. Drawing on archival work in the US, the UK, and Europe, this was the first show to be devoted to Lear’s sketches and landscape drawings from across the whole range of his career. The initiative featured school visits, workshops, and collaborations with Birmingham’s SHOUT festival of Queer Art and Culture and other community groups.
At Oxford I founded the Poets at Keble series, a seminar on The Poet’s Essay with Adam Phillips, a seminar on Poetry and Painting with T. J. Clark, and The Salutation and Cat Reading Group with Erica McAlpine. I also run a monthly poetry reading group at HMP Grendon, Europe’s only Therapeutic Community Prison. More information available here.
I have written for The London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Raritan, Poetry, and other papers and journals. My essays for the LRB are available here; podcasts/interviews based on my work for Poetry are available here and here. In 2023 I organised a three-day programme of events in New York — Always More Roses: James Schuyler at 100 — to celebrate the poet’s centenary. The initiative involved collaborations with Dia, NYU, and The Poetry Project. Future projects include a study of Schuyler and a book on modern lyric entitled Momentaneity.
Geoffrey Hill taking part in conversations at the Salutation & Cat
(photo by Jonathan Galassi)
Teaching Areas
I teach subjects and authors from the eighteenth century to the present.
Undergraduate: Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature); Nineteenth-Century Literature (1830-1910); Modern Literature (1910-Present); Paper 5 (1760-1830), along with various special topics (‘The Character of Comedy’ ‘The Literary Essay’, ‘Seeing Things: Poetry & Painting’) and dissertation supervision.
Graduate: MSt in English, 1700-1830, MSt in English, 1830-1914, MSt in English, 1900-Present
In the last 10 years or so, I have supervised / co-supervised / examined PhD dissertations on a range of subjects, including:
Poetic Address in C. H. Sisson, W. S. Graham and Geoffrey Hill; Byron and Epistolary Poetics; Joyce and Nonsense; Thom Gunn and The Occasions of Poetry; Victorian War Poetry; John Clare and the Poetics of Health; Kipling and Yeats – A Comparative Biography; Milton After Eliot (Lowell, Empson, and Hill); Forms of Textual Excess in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey; The Tiny, The Miniature, and The Small in Modern American Poetry (Dickinson, Bishop, Moore, Niedecker, and Kay Ryan); Resistances to Knowing in Victorian Poetry; Poetic Revisionism (Wordsworth, Dickinson, Tennyson, Hopkins)
Selected Publications
Books / Edited Collections / Editions
Edward Lear: Moment to Moment, ed. and intro (Ikon, 2022), pp. 144
Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago University Press, 2019), pp. 303
Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry, co-ed. with James Williams (Oxford UP, 2016), pp. 381
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. (OUP, 2013; pbk 2016), pp. 912
Lessons In Byron (Pan Macmillan, 2013), pp. 120
Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), pp. 150
The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford UP, 2007; paperback 2010), pp. 302
Some Versions of Empson, ed. (Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 376
Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson, ed. (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), pp. 504
Articles in Books
‘Edward Lear’s Moment’, in Edward Lear: Moment to Moment (Ikon, 2022), 9-33
‘Laughable Poetry’, in Affect and Literature, ed. Alex Houen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 222-48.
‘Charles Lamb . . . Seriously’, in Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Hurley and Marcus Waithe (Oxford UP, 2018), 35-54
‘Introduction’ [co-written with James Williams], and ‘Falling for Edward Lear’, in Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry, co-ed. with James Williams (Oxford UP, 2016), 1-15 & 134-61
‘At Work With Victorian Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford UP, 2013), 1-16
‘Dickens by the Clock’, in Dickens’s Style, ed. Daniel Tyler (Cambridge UP, 2013; paperback 2015), 46-72
‘Byron’s Feet’, in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Ohio UP, 2011), 78-104
‘Tennyson’s Humour’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford UP, 2009), 231-58
‘Empson in the Round’, in Some Versions of Empson (Oxford UP, 2007), 1-20
‘Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (Oxford UP, 2007), 7-33
Articles in Journals, Essays, Reviews, etc.
‘Edward Lear’s Happiness’, Victorian Poetry, 58.2 (Summer 2020), 187-205
‘Some Birds’, Poetry (March 2020), 597-610
‘Poetry by Numbers’, Raritan, 37.2 (Fall 2017), 37-64
‘In Search of Distraction’, Poetry (November 2017), 171-94
‘Unknowing Lyric’, Poetry (March 2017), 575-89
‘The Funny Thing About Trees’, Raritan (Winter 2014), 86-116
‘Eliot Among the Comedians’, Literary Imagination, 16.2 (July 2014), 135-56
‘Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight’ [2012 British Academy Chatterton Lecture on poetry], Journal of The British Academy, 1 (2013), 31-69
‘Wordsworth’s Folly’, The Wordsworth Circle, 43.3 (Summer 2012), 146-51
‘Wordsworth at Play’, Essays in Criticism, 61.1 (January 2011), 54-78
‘Warring Claims: Victorian Poetry and Conflict’, Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 66 (October 2007), 415-49
‘Joyce’s Love Letters’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 44.2 (2007), 354-57
‘William Empson’, 4000-word entry in The Literary Encyclopedia (2004)
‘Tennyson’s “Roses on the Terrace”: A New Manuscript’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 8.2 (2003), 118-20
‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.2 (Autumn 2003), 577-91
‘Tennyson, Ireland, and “The Powers of Speech”’, Victorian Poetry, 39 (Fall 2001), 345-64
‘Dickens in Public’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (July 2001), 330-52
‘Temporizing Dickens’, Review of English Studies, 52 (May 2001), 171-91
‘Ruskin, Bright, and the Politics of Eloquence’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 27.2 (Fall 2000), 177-90
‘Tennyson’s Civil Tongue’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7.3 (November 1999), 113-25
Selected review-articles / essays include:
‘A Tight Spot‘ [on Elizabeth Bishop], The New York Review of Books (December 2023)
‘Cool Vertigo‘ [on W. H. Auden], LRB (2 March 2023)
‘The Man With Night Sweats‘ [on Thom Gunn], Harper’s (March 2022)
‘A Whack of Pies‘ [on Charlotte Mew], LRB (16 December 2021)
‘On Charles Wright‘, LRB (1 April 2021)
‘Giddy with Thinking‘ [on Kay Ryan], The New York Review of Books (Sept 2020)
‘Faintly Risible, Obscurely Resonant‘ [on Wordsworth], Harper’s (July 2020)
‘On Rachael Allen‘, LRB (5 March 2020)
‘On Douglas Crase‘, LRB (25 November 2019)
‘Gravity’s Smoothest Dream‘ [on A. R. Ammons], LRB (7 March 2019), 31-33
‘Foiled by Pleasure‘ [on Elizabeth Barrett Browning], LRB (30 August 2018), 32-34
‘Are you a tome?‘ [on Edward Lear], LRB (14 December 2017), 27-30
‘It Wants to Go to Bed with Us’ [on John Ashbery], Harper’s (June 2017), 78-84
‘Supping on Horrors‘ [on Thomas De Quincey], Harper’s (October 2016), 85-93
‘What most I love I bite’ [on Stevie Smith] LRB (28 July 2016), 19-21
‘The lighthouse stares back’ [on Elizabeth Bishop] LRB (7 January 2016), 9-10
‘I can bite anything I want’ [on Lewis Carroll] LRB (16 July 2015), 17-20
‘Damn the Respectable’ [on Edward Thomas] Literary Review (May 2015)
‘It is still mañana’, [on Robert Frost] LRB (19 February 2015), 21-24
‘Metropolitan Miscreants’ [on nineteenth-century London] LRB 4 July 2013), 32-33
‘Kids Gone Rotten’ [on Treasure Island] LRB (25 October 2012), 26-28
‘Deleecious’ [on William Hazlitt] LRB (6 November 2008), 26-28