Between the Downs and the Sea: Romantics in Sussex

The author and scholar Professor Alexandra Harris explores the relationship between place and poetry, in particular the role which Chichester played in inspiring Keats, Blake and William Collins.

This is the Keats Foundation Annual Lecture. Free to attend, booking strongly recommended.

Alxexandra Harris is the author of Weatherlands: Writers and Artists under English Skies and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination, from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.

‘Nothing worth speaking of’ happened on Keats’s 1819 excursion over the South Downs to Chichester and then to Bedhampton – nothing except most of The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark. William Blake referred to his Sussex years as a ‘slumber on the banks of the ocean’, but it was a fruitful sleep in which Chichester appeared as a version of Jerusalem. William Collins, who spent most of his life in Chichester, catches the music of his ‘native plains’ in some of his most influential odes. This lecture will consider Keats and his predecessors in this small part of Sussex, and will explore more broadly the relationship between place and poetry.