Maurice Manning: Place and the Composition of Poetic Self (January 2011)

In this lecture Manning examines the generative role a specific geography plays in composing a sense of poetic self. Through a study of the ways in which Coleridge’s “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” and Robert Penn Warren’s “The Ballad of Billie Potts” render place on the page, Manning explores how these poets use tone, syntax, and form to simultaneously render self.