Exploring Literature Facilitator – David Sumner, tel: 01988 850368

Last updated 27th January

Are there great works of literature that you feel you should read, and might get round to one day, but never seem to find the time? That was the main reason for starting our U3A group ‘Exploring Literature’. There are so many great works in the Western canon of literature that it’s hard to know where to start – I decided to reduce the field, at least initially, by concentrating on long narrative poems. Even with a ‘reduced field’, there’s still a great deal to choose from – Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Wordsworth….and so on. But the first, and many would say, the greatest of these is Homer’s Iliad – so that’s what we started with. It took us nearly seven months to read, in fairly regular fortnightly sessions. I think we all found it an extremely enjoyable and indeed enriching experience.

Since then we have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous), Sohrab and Rustum (Matthew Arnold), The Prelude (Wordsworth), The Lays of Ancient Rome (Macaulay), Four Quartets (TS Eliot) and Beowulf (anonymous). Anybody in the group can suggest a text and the choice is made democratically!

We returned to Homer and read the Odyssey (in the lively translation by Robert Fagles), and we are now nearing the end of Milton's Paradise Lost. Next up is a complete contrast - John Betjeman's verse autobiography Summoned by Bells . Then we go back two millennia to Virgil's Aeneid, which tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans.

Meetings are usually held fortnightly on Monday mornings in the Old Bank Bookshop, Wigtown from 10.00am to 12 noon. If you’d like to join in, please phone David Sumner on 01988 850368

The next meetings will be on Mondays 6th and 20th February when we will be reading Summoned  by Bells by John Betjeman, and then going on to Virgil's Aeneid.