Introduction

Worlds and Lives (AQA Poetry Anthology)

In this course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the fifteen poems that make up the ‘Worlds and Lives’ cluster for GCSE English Literature (AQA). Each poem is read in detail, with a short commentary highlighting aspects of language, style, themes, motifs, and so on. In the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, for example, we think about the importance of the concordance between man and nature in Romantic thought, while in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’ we think about the hope with which Shelley ends the poem – and so on for the same collection.

The poems discussed in this course are:
1. William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring (1798)
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, England in 1819 (written 1819, published 1839)
3. Emily Brontë, Shall earth no more inspire me (written 1841, published 1850)
4. George Eliot, In a London Drawingroom (written 1869, published in 1959)
5. James Berry, On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955 (1990)
6. Raman Mundair, Name Journeys (2003)
7. shamshad khan, pot (2007)
8. Seni Seneviratne, A Wider View (2007)
9. Liz Berry, Homing (2014)
10. Imtiaz Dharker, A century later (2014)
11. Louisa Adjoa Parker, The Jewellery Maker (2018)
12. Raymond Antrobus, With Birds You’re Never Lonely (2019)
13. Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise (2019)
14. Grace Nichols, Like an Heiress (2020)
15. Caleb Femi, Thirteen (2020)

Introduction

In this lecture, we provide an introduction to the set of poems that make up the Worlds and Lives cluster, exploring some of the themes that run through the collection, and especially the conflict between man and nature, and the relationship between past, present and future.