THIS STUDY IS FULLY BOOKED BUT WE ARE CONSIDERING OFFERING A SECOND OPTION, PLEASE EMAIL US IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE ADDED TO THE WAITING LIST.

Step into the vast cosmos of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in this immersive eight-week study. More than a poem, Milton’s epic is a world unto itself, one with vaulted heavens, smouldering hells and a fragile Eden. It presents a realm where every choice tips the balance of creation. This study invites curious minds to lose themselves in the epic’s grandeur and wrestle with the questions it refuses to let go: what does it mean to rebel? To obey? To be free? To fall?

Over eight two-and-a-half-hour sessions, we will traverse all twelve books of Paradise Lost, tracing Milton’s visions of angels in revolt, serpentine deceits, and humankind on the brink of catastrophe. Each week, close reading of key passages will spark lively conversation about the poem’s grand themes: freedom and fate, temptation and grace, the allure of evil, and the possibility of redemption. Along the way, we shall uncover the thunderous music and daring invention that defines Milton’s verse.

This study is as much about experience as analysis. Reading this great work aloud will enable us to feel the powerful rhythm, sharpen our thinking in the heat of dialogue, and discover together how a 17th-century poet still speaks to us with urgent clarity. Participants will not just read Paradise Lost. They will inhabit it, wrestle with it, and carry its fire forward.

Whether you come for epic storytelling, moral philosophy, or the sheer intoxication of language, this study promises a journey that is as challenging as it is exhilarating. Experience or rediscover Milton’s masterpiece and join us as we explore what it means to “awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-week study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Julie Sutherland
• Eight two-and-a-half-hour meetings, Tuesdays, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)
• 3 March – 21 April 2026
• £320 for eight meetings and background notes and resources
• We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

So begins Dante’s epic journey. The Inferno takes us into the depths of Hell, where we meet such remarkable characters as Francesca, Ulysses and Ugolino and hear their stories of passion, pride and hatred. Dante writes in the first person as a very human voyager, reacting with strong and varied emotions to the characters before him, as the reader might. As we pass through an array of landscapes, each peculiarly appropriate to the sins of the inmates there, Dante presents a psychological study of what leads men and women into destructive behaviours. How can we understand good and evil? Dante challenges us with the big questions.  

Like Joyce, Dante is an ideal author for an in-depth study at the LitSalon. The Divine Comedy has multiple meanings that provide rich material for discussion. The poem weaves together myth, theology, history and the contemporary life of Dante’s time. For his epic poem Dante created a new and beautiful poetic form – terza rima. This form interlocks the rhymes from stanza to stanza in a binding forward movement. For preference, we will read the English translation by John and Jean Hollander with its excellent notes, but as an alternative the Robin Kirkpatrick translation may be more readily available. In addition to reading in translation, facilitator Sean Forester will help you experience a few select examples of the original Italian.  

Join us as we read one of the classics of world literature. Find out for yourself why T.S. Eliot declared “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them.”

STUDY DETAILS:

• Eleven meeting study (on Zoom) led by Sean Forester
• Wednesdays 5.30-7.30 pm (UK)
• 14, 21, 28 January, 4, 11, 18, 25 February, 4,11,18, 25 March 2026
• £385 for 11 sessions, to include opening notes and resources
• Recommended editions, The Inferno by Dante Alighieri:

  • Random House USA, translated by Robert & Jean Hollander, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0385496988 (N.B. this is a US edition and not always easy to source in the UK)
  • Alternatively, in the UK: Penguin Classics, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0140448955

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

We can love poetry our whole lives without any knowledge of poetic forms, conventions or prosody. That’s part of its magic. But understanding a bit more about them — as most poets do — adds another layer of pleasure and appreciation to something we did not think we could possibly love more.

The tools we’ll begin using in this accessible five-week study give us delicious new ways to eavesdrop on poets as they speak not only to us but also to one another, to tradition, to history and to convention. We will consider definitions and examples of five primary poetic forms and explore how each poet’s making or breaking of its conventions illuminates the two to three poems we read in each session.

Enjoy the beauties of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, then get in on Wallace Stevens’ joke, as well as his deeper meaning, when he spoofs stereotypes about American cultural barbarism 99 years later in Anecdote of the Jar.

Watch James Merrill flex by linking seven sonnet variations together in The Broken Home, his formal skill and wit bring stability and order to the familial and cultural chaos this autobiographical poem recounts.

In One Art, Elizabeth Bishop, like Dylan Thomas before her, commandeers the incantatory, dance-inspired Villanelle form to rage against a series of losses, including the suicide of Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, her longtime lover. Tim Seibles mixes the strict, previously snow white form with the Blues to mourn his African-American parents in All the Time Blues Villanelle.

William Cowper (Epitaph on a Hare) and Alan Ginsberg (To Aunt Rose) subvert elegiac conventions originally rooted in patrician Ancient Greece. Cowper by solemnly eulogising the merits of his pet hare; Ginsburg by recasting the life of his “nobody” Newark-based working class Jewish communist immigrant aunt as the stuff of legend.

Each week we’ll delve into a variety of poems — some traditional and some intent on breaking the mould; some old and some new — all are available for free online (or in one or two cases through facilitator handouts).

Week-by-week reading schedule (Thursdays 6.30-8.30 pm UK):

1. 5 March: Sonnet
2. 12 March: Villanelle
3. 19 March: Elegy
4. 26 March: Ode
5. 2 April: Sestina

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five week live online study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• Thursday 5 March to 2 April, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK)
• Five weeks £175 (individual sessions can be booked at £40 each, please email us for more information)

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.