Our next book club will be February 19, 2023 when we’ll be discussing contemporaries of Jane Austen, and this time: poets! We’ll be exploring poems and poets likely familiar to Jane Austen like William Cowper, Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Gordon (Lord Byron), and even some poems by Jane Austen herself.
The Details
What: Virtual Book Club: Poets Familiar to Jane Austen
When: February 19, 2023 from 2:00-3:30 p.m.
Where: In the comfort of your home via Zoom
RSVP: This is a member-only event; it is FREE but RSVP is required. Register here.
Accessibility: We have auto-captions available in the Zoom meeting. There will be a PowerPoint presentation that will have a mixture of text and images. If you have accessibility needs we have not addressed here, please let us know.
The reading
We’ll be reading a selection of poetry by poets likely to have been familiar to Jane Austen (and some poems by Austen herself!). There is quite a selection of poetry we’ve collected for this book club, and even excerpted the poetry altogether could feel lengthy. Please feel free to shorten your reading as needed, or plan to break up your reading stints accordingly. All poems and excerpts are collected here in this PDF.
For those who prefer to hunt down the poems and excerpts to read them in physical books, here is the list of poems with their authors:
- William Collins: “Ode to Pity”
- William Cowper: Excerpts from “The Sofa” (ln. 1-180 of Book I) and “The Winter Walk at Noon” (this excerpt, line numbers unknown from Book VI) from The Task
- George Crabbe: Excerpt from “The Village” Book I (ln. 168-261)
- Charlotte Smith: “Written at the close of Spring,” “To Melancholy,” and “Composed during a Walk on the Downs, Nov. 1787” from Elegiac Sonnets
- William Wordsworth: “I Walked Lonely as a Cloud,” “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” and “Nutting”
- Sir Walter Scott: “The Western Waves of Ebbing Day” from Lady of the Lake, “My Native Land” (Canto VI.I) from The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Excerpt from “Introduction to Canto First” from Marmion (ln. 1-70)
- George Gordon, Lord Byron: Canto I.I from The Corsair (ln. 1-42), “Unquenched, unquenchable” from The Giaour (ln. 751-780)
- Jane Austen: “Ode to Pity,” “In measured verse,” “Camilla, good humoured, & merry, & small,” and “When Winchester races first took their beginning”
About the Virtual Book Club
The Virtual Book Club takes place quarterly with the following rotation:
- February – Contemporary of Austen
- May – Nonfiction work
- August – An Austen work
- November – Fan fiction
Our members Mary Jane Curry, Nancy Martin-Young, and Sara Tavela help coordinate book selections and rotate through facilitating meetings.