Dr Oliver Clarkson

I taught for a good while at Oxford previously before spending a year at the University of Warwick.

I am writing a book on Wordsworth’s poetry—which I’m calling Wordsworth and the Artistry of Imperfection—that celebrates those stylistic ‘irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty’ (to borrow words from John Ruskin). I am also editor (with Will Bowers, QMUL, and Andrew Hodgson, Birmingham) of a new three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, under contract with Oxford University Press, which will present all 741 of Shelley’s known letters freshly transcribed and edited from manuscript.

In the past I have taught literature from 1660 to the present day at Oxford. At LMH I teach FHS 4 (1660–1760), FHS 5 (1760–1830), Prelims 1b, and the CLENG Epic paper. For the English Faculty I give lectures on eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry and teach an MSt course on the English and American ode.

‘The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters’. Romanticism and the Letter (Palgrave, 2020), ed. Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, pp. 45-60.

‘Wordsworth’s Negative Way’. Essays in Criticism 67.2 (April 2017), pp. 116-35.

(Co-authored with Andrew Hodgson). ‘Romantic Rhyme and the Airs that Stray’. Romanticism 23.2 (July 2017), pp. 111-22.

(Co-edited with Andrew Hodgson). Special issue of Romanticism 23.2 (July 2017) on 'Rhyme'.

‘Wordsworth’s Lyric Moments (1802)’. Essays in Criticism 65.2 (April 2015), pp. 125-43.

‘Glimpses of Tranquillity: A Reading of The Ruined Cottage’. Charles Lamb Bulletin 160 (Autumn 2014), pp. 125-35.

‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Source for Wordsworth’s River in Book IX of The Prelude’. Notes and Queries 60.2 (April 2013), pp. 236-37.

‘Ghost-Words: A Review of Romantic Shades and Shadows by Susan J. Wolfson’. Essays in Criticism 69.4 (October 2019), pp. 492-500.