Serious Presentations
Lance has created several unique presentations based around a selection of his favourite English poets. He explores their lives and work by performing selections of their best-known and most important poetry.
Photo courtesy of Jane Bown
John Betjeman (1906-84)
He achieved huge success during his lifetime and continues to retain his 'National Treasure' status more than twenty years after his death. He is by a long way the best-selling English poet of the 20th century. His gift for writing light verse, his dazzling technical abilities and his combination of eccentricity and Englishness are all key ingredients in his enduring popularity.
Lance offers four different presentations of Sir John's poems. One on his life story, one on his faith, one on the countryside and one celebrating his best loved poems. Lance has also made an audio recording of his poems.
George Herbert (1593-1633)
After a career at court, he became a respected pastor, but is most famous for his poems, which Lance believes are one of the greatest treasures both of Christian spirituality and of English literature. Lance has also made an audio recording of his poems.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
For 200 years he was best known for the hymn ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and the comic poem ‘John Gilpin’. As a close associate of John (‘Amazing Grace’) Newton, he co-authored the Olney Hymns and wrote poems against the slave trade; his best work is very moving as it was written in the face of recurrent bouts of depression.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)
Although Hopkins lived and worked in the Victorian era, his poems were not published till 1918. They seemed startlingly modern then, and still do today. He was a Jesuit monk, and wrote some of the most exciting and profound Christian poetry ever.
John Milton (1608-74)
Until the 20th century, he was universally reckoned to be England’s second greatest poet after Shakespeare. But he is largely ignored today. For the quarter-centenary of his birth in 2008, Lance plans to restore his reputation.
Lance offers two shows about Milton. The first contains extracts from Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas and the Sonnets. In the second he recites and enacts Book 9 of Paradise Lost – the fall of Adam and Eve – one of the highest peaks of English literature.