Dr Edward Clarke

 

Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (English Literature)

Biography

Edward Clarke is a Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (English Literature) at the Department for Continuing Education and a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He is the author of three books of criticism, The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books, 2014), and The Secret Mind of Art (Angelico Press, 2023). His collection of poems, A Book of Psalms, was published by Paraclete Press in 2020. ‘Clarke’s Psalter’, the documentary he presented about writing these poems, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His latest collection of poems is called Cherubims (Kelsay Books, 2022). He has an MA (Hons) in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. For the Department he teaches on the Undergraduate Certificate in English Literature, the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing, the weekly learning programmes, and various summer schools.

Research Interests

He is interested in poetic allusion, imitation and influence. In this regard, his research has focused on numerous poets, including Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Milton, and Shakespeare. He has edited the work of Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, and these poets have led him to explore the relationship between the Bible and poetry in English.

Publications

Books

The Secret Mind of Art (Angelico Press, 2023)

Divine Themes and Celestial Praise: Henry Vaughan and George Herbert (SLG Press, 2023)

Cherubims (Kelsay Books, 2022)

The Voice inside Our Home: Selected Poems (SLG Press, 2022)

A Book of Psalms (Paraclete Press, 2020)

Eighteen Psalms (Periplum Poetry, 2018)

The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books, 2014)

The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Essays

‘The Seven: A Prosimetrum’, The Penitential Psalms: The Rise, Fall and Future of the Seven Psalms, ed. Mark Whiting (Wipf and Stock, 2025; forthcoming)

‘Berryman’s Mischief’, John Berryman: Centenary Essays, eds Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (Peter Lang, 2017), 65-81

‘“The cry that contains its converse in itself”: Voices in the Poem at the End of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems’, The Modern Language Review (105.2; April 2010), 345-65

‘Ariel among the Second Selves: Wallace Stevens and William Wordsworth in Creative Conversation’, The Wallace Stevens Journal (30.1; Spring 2006), 30-43

‘Berryman in His Sycamore’, Essays and Reflections on John Berryman, eds Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan (Rodopi, 2006), 75-80

‘George Economou’, ‘George Starbuck’ and ‘Charles Tomlinson’, The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of American Poetry and Poetics, eds Jeffrey Gray, James McCorkle and McAleer Balkum (Greenwood Press, 2006), 2: 454-5, 5: 1519-20 and 5: 1600-2