Poetry and the British Museum — A New Era

The Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum, the Institute of Classical Studies, and the Institute of English Studies are excited to be hosting a poetry evening within the context of the three-day conference, “The Ancient Mediterranean and the British Museum - Past and Futures”. This event will bring together 10 internationally renowned poets for a live reading that weaves together new poetry and past voices who have passed through, worked in, and been inspired by the Museum’s historic spaces and its collections.

The Museum’s round Reading Room was more than a library—it was a daily workspace for writers such as Ezra Pound, H.D., Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats. Just beyond its walls, the Hall of Greek and Latin Inscriptions, the galleries of Greek and Roman antiquities, and the Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Polynesian collections furnished the modernist imagination with luminous details, inspiring new images, grammars,…