England 2023: Overview Please join me on this pilgrimage which begins in July 2023. Find all the details at the following link: https://www.reho.com/bespoke-trips/1000-years-of-poetry-and-the-contemplative-tradition-england-2023/ The adventure begins in London on the site where Chaucer’s pilgrims set out in 1390. Next comes Canterbury, with its Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey, and its legacy of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.…
Category: Francis Webb
Greetings and farewell from A/Prof Michael Griffith (Literature: Strathfield)
I am retiring after 45 years at ACU. While it certainly sounds a long time, I remember vividly my first days on Castle Hill Campus in 1977 and then the flow of new literature students, through Castle Hill, then Mount Saint Mary and occasionally MacKillop. Every year a wonderful crop of new faces, new enthusiasms!…
Francis Webb- Aquinas Academy- Session 4
Today’s Session covered Francis Webb’s most well known poem (and his own favourite) “Five Days Old” with its celebration of the way a young child can awaken an experience of transformation in an adult. We then turned to Webb’s exploration of the creative power of St Francis of Assisi, the sequence of poems The Canticle. This…
Francis Webb – Seminar 3- Aquinas Academy
Today we explored more deeply Webb’s quest for the “tender voyaging line of truth”, figured so often in something that exists beyond the inner and outer chaos of the present moment. Sometimes it is the sounds of birds (the two words of the cuckoo), sometimes it is a star (echoing the story Webb was told…
Francis Webb Seminar 2: Aquinas Academy
This week we explored the theme suggested by Herbert Read in his introduction to the first edition of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems: “the so tender voyaging line of truth”. This line appears in the poem “Self-Portrait”, part of Webb’s praise of the artist Anthony Sandys (1806-1883) which appears in Webb’s Around Costessey series. Here are some…
Francis Webb Seminar 1- Aquinas Academy07/02/2017
Today’s session explored the complex background to Francis Webb’s powerful creative imagination. We looked first at “On First Hearing a Cuckoo”, partly inspired by Frederick Delius’ On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring. Here is a reading of the poem and the conversation that ensued: The seminar then moved on to explore two of Webb’s early poems…
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