Italian Influencers: Transreading Italian Poetry
Inimitable Italian poetics – from the classical to the current.
The influence of Italian culture on English literature is hard to overestimate. The great writers of the Italian Renaissance sent shock waves across the continent and provided British writers with forms, templates, themes, and procedures that would endure. Without Italian influencers the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan lyricists, Spencer, Milton, and many others is difficult to imagine.
Such influences pervaded the 18th century too, and the Romantic imagination, as well as Victorians such as Browning and the Modernists. Contemporary Italian remains a potent European force. In this course we will we writing poetry inspired by key Italian models. We will go back as far as Lentini – the creator of the first sonnets back in Palermo in the early 13th century – and we will get up to date with poetry in Italian from recent years. All texts will be provided in English, as well as Italian.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]; conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @gabiontheroad
About Peter Hughes 
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Peter Hughes is a poet and the founding editor of Oystercatcher Press, now based in Spello, Italy. In 2016 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. His many books include a Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2013), innovative versions of all Petrarch’s sonnets Quite Frankly (Reality Street Editions, 2015), Cavalcanty (Carcanet, 2017), Arrangements (with Eléna Rivera, Aquifer, 2022), The Modulus of Rupture (Shearsman, 2023) and Lent (Equipage, 2024).
"Online courses become communities of people with love for language, literature, and expression. They are needed now more than ever – for us to be able to have sustained conversations in a world where often such respectful exchanges are difficult to practise."
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