Daniel Tobin: The Odeon (January 2016)

The notion of the Odeon (from the Greek oideion, or “singing place”), an imaginative space affirming the poet as a singer of deep registers beyond the particulars of circumstance, provides a frame for this lecture’s discussion of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Throughout, Daniel Tobin explores Seamus Heaney’s idea that poetry optimally reflects “an impulse toward transcendence.”