Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis | Wordsworth's Poetic Memory - John Mullan

For Wordsworth, as for other Romantic poets, poetry was the best, and the most natural, medium for autobiographical writing. This talk will sample episodes from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the greatest autobiographical poem in the English language. Whilst examining its evasions, it will show how it still manages to plumbs the deeps of a person’s memory, and in ways that any reader can recognise.

John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. His most recent book is The Artful Dickens (Bloomsbury, 2020). His other books include What Matters in Jane Austen? (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Anonymity. A Secret History of English Literature (Faber and Faber, 2007). He is also a broadcaster and journalist, writing on contemporary fiction for the Guardian. He is the author of How Novels Work (OUP, 2006) and in 2009 was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.  

Series Summary

‘"I must find new words": Dialogues on Poetry and Psychoanalysis’ 

So moved by her experience of being psychoanalysed by Freud, the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declared, “I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being.” This Summer Series, through lectures and discussions with poets, scholars and analysts, considers various encounters between the cultures of poetry and psychoanalysis, their rich historical dialogues, methods of finding and new coinages. 

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