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The University of the Third Age - Welwyn Hatfield

Poetry Study Group

Meetings are held on alternate Thursday mornings, from 10am 'til noon, in Welwyn Garden City.

Group Leader: Hazel Bell, 01707 265201; hkb@aidanbell.com

We don’t write poetry: we just indulge in it, choosing a topic or poet for each meeting (those selected so far are listed below) and each bringing six or so poems on that theme or by that poet, to read aloud to the group, which then discusses them. So much enjoyment is to be had by the reading of poetry. You can be moved by the simplest, shortest of poems – for instance, A. E. Housman’s untitled war poem:

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

The density of poetry can imply so much meaning in few words, in such lines as the opening of W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm.

Or a stanza may be as deliciously puzzzling as Louis Macneice’s:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

A poem may create a work of art using words instead of paint or musical notes, as in Swinburne’s greeting of the Spring:

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

We are now full, with enthusiastic members: but if you would like to become one, I could put your name on a waiting list, or help you to start a new group.

Meetings for 2025 will be:

Past subjects

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

(Zoom meetings)

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

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

Web-site created by Roger Swaine.