The London Review of Books Winter Lectures for 2026

Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? This lecture will consider the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and whether Auden was right in thinking that a poem that exemplified the pluralist values of liberal democracy would be ‘formless, windy, banal and utterly boring’.