Stimmy Herbert – talk by Amrita Dhar

Where: In-person on Swansea University Singleton Campus, Talbot Building, Room 980 (1st floor, accessible from the Faraday Building main entrance)
When: 8th October 2026 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
This seminar will consider George Herbert’s collection The Temple (1633) as a neurodivergent work. I don’t at all propose to be diagnostic about it (and I am not interested in contemporary medicine as a lens through which to read poetry), but I was teaching some of Herbert’s poetry recently, and I was struck anew by how much discussion there is in the poems about pain, about Herbert’s sheer nervousness around poetic craft, and indeed, by how stimmy some of the poems are. (If ever there was a poet in early modernity of whom we really should speak in terms of their bodymind, it is surely Herbert.) In this seminar, I want to read a selection of (4-5 pre-circulated) poems from The Temple to think about where poetry becomes a grounding and a return for a neurodivergent poet; of pain that may only be bearable in poetry; what neurodiversity studies can offer Herbert; and what Herbert can offer neurodiversity studies.

Hosted by the AMEND project, funded by Wellcome.

Registration beforehand requested.