Of Poems & Pillars

A lecture on the survival of the Gothic and the Victorian imagination

A talk given to the Clanfield and Bampton Historical Society, this lecture ranged over a swathe of history, culminating in the great flowering of the Gothic revival in the 19th century – and the intense acts of imagination that accompanied it.  Poetry and architecture go hand in hand through the “gothick” of Strawberry Hill and the early poems of Milton, Clare and Gray, to inspire the Arts & Crafts movements encompassing Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris, finally to emerge in the 20th century in the live and loves of our most popular poet, John Betjeman.