Professor of English and Creative Writing Onno Oerlemans delivered a paper titled “‘The Self-Same Song:’ Birdsong and Romantic Poetics” at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference in Winnipeg. The 23rd annual conference, co-hosted by The University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, was held Aug. 13-16 and focused on “Romanticism & Rights.”
Oerlemans’ paper explored how recent scientific understanding of the complexity of birdsong, which can be thought of as a kind of animal culture, can deepen our understanding of Romantic-period poems about birdsong, such as Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” Coleridge’s “Nightingale,” and Claire’s “Progress of Rhyme.”
