“AS IF I MYSELF SHOULD BE LEFT BEHIND”: WILLIAM MORRIS IN ICELAND, A TALK BY LAVINIA GREENLAW

September 23, 2017 14.15 at The Coach House, Kelmscott House

“As if I myself should be left behind”

The reasons for Morris’s journeys to Iceland are complex. The journal he wrote while he was there reveals more about them then he probably knew. As he writes about ponies and lava, frying pans and rain, he unconsciously returns to questions of travel and how we travel in order to escape ourselves only to discover that we cannot leave ourselves behind. His artist’s eye empties itself when confronted with the strangeness and emptiness of this new landscape and he describes what he sees with an exhilarating freshness.

Lavinia Greenlaw is a poet and writer of fiction and non-fiction. She has held residencies at the Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Society of Medicine, is on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former Chair of the Poetry Society. Her book Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland responds to Morris’s Icelandic journals and explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.