‘The Poet’s Essay’ with Adam Phillips
“One goes to psychoanalysis, as one might go to poetry, for better words.”
—Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises
Matthew Bevis, Professor of English Literature, writes:
Various developments in recent years have helped to enhance Keble’s international reputation as a thriving centre for the study of poetry, and one of the College’s most popular initiatives — now in its 10th year — is the Adam Phillips seminar on The Poet’s Essay. Phillips is the author of over 20 books on a wide range of literary and psychoanalytical subjects, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1994), On Flirtation (1995), Terrors and Experts (1997), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Darwin’s Worms (1999), Houdini’s Box (2001), Missing Out (2012), Attention Seeking (2019), and, most recently, On Giving Up (2024).
He has also contributed to studies of photography and exhibitions on dress history, as well as editing writings by Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, Richard Howard, and Sigmund Freud (in 2003 he was appointed as the General Editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud). Phillips was poetry editor of the Observer in 2008, and he has been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for several years. The New Yorker has described him as “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer,” and John Banville has praised him as “one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time.”
The Poet’s Essay seminars take place three times a year and each meeting lasts around one and a half hours. The series is free and open to all who wish to attend (there are no sign-up lists or reserved places). Seminars focus primarily on American poetry of the twentieth century: a few weeks before each event, a handout is made available via a downloadable link on the series webpage and at the meeting Phillips introduces the material and leads the discussion. “Poetry,” he has suggested, “is words hospitable to interpretation, words wanting to be subject to multiple perspectives,” and the interdisciplinary nature of the series often involves conversations across traditional boundaries (literature, history, psychology, politics, and philosophy). As well as feeding into recent discussions in the medical humanities, the seminars also benefit from—and help to encourage—a growing interest in the relations between poetry and various forms of therapy. The series is regularly attended, for example, not only by university staff and students from many different Faculties, but also by health professionals working in the NHS and private practice and by members of the general public.
The Poet’s Essay is supported by grants from the College’s Research Committee, and it complements other ventures we run here: Poets at Keble and The Poetry & Painting seminars with T J Clark, both generously funded by Jason Pontin, and The Salutation & Cat reading group. For more information on any of these initiatives, please see this webpage, or feel free to contact Professor Matthew Bevis.
