The Loss of Innocence: Resistance and Rebellion in the Multimedia Poetry of Caleb Femi and William Blake

This project offers you an opportunity to explore the multimedia work of one of the most important contemporary Black British poets—and to reimagine the canon of Romantic poetry for artists, readers and students today.

Summary

How does the revelatory poetry of childhood by the London British-Nigerian poet, photographer, film director and musician Caleb Femi (born 1990) resituate Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794) by the radical visionary poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827)?

London poets both, Blake saw his first vision while walking on Peckham-Rye at the age of 8—while Femi, aged 7, left his grandmother’s home in Nigeria to join his parents on the North Peckham Estate. A former London laureate for young people, Femi’s first poetry collection, Poor (2020), with illustrations, echoes the form of Blake’s ‘illuminated books’ and shares Blake’s defiant questioning of, in Femi’s words, ‘how innocence works and what the loss of innocence does’. As the contemporary poet has said: ‘I was trying to contribute to the work of the Romantics.’

Involving the study of poetry, film, book illustration and photography, this project will allow you to develop your interest in any or all of these art forms as you research the experience of being young and disenfranchised in 21st century Britain. You’ll contribute to current efforts to diversify the curriculum and to establish the relevance of literary Romanticism in our cultural moment.

Aims

This project aims to contribute to current attempts in Romanticist studies to diversify the curriculum and to embrace material from texts past and present on representations of childhood innocence and experience. It seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Blake’s Romanticism to contemporary poetry, visual illustration, photography, film and music, focussing on, but not necessarily limited to, Femi’s metropolitan poetics of resistance.

Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, Blake’s iconoclastic approach to poetry, music and art has parallels in the poetry, music and art of Caleb Femi. You will produce the first sustained comparative analysis of these two poets of rebellion and resistance, who share a facility in working across media and genres, a close connection to Peckham, and signal interests in youth, innocence and experience.

Working across two distinct and important moments in the history of politically engaged, multimodal poetry, you’ll develop historically sensitive and creative methods for bridging the divides of time and media. You’ll position yourself at the cutting edge of efforts to diversify the canon of British poetry, establishing the value of scholarship that reinterprets the past and provides new avenues for understanding the present.

Not only that, but this project will offer you opportunities to make poetry relevant and alive for a diverse range of people inside and outside of the university, especially young people. You’ll engage with archival and other research materials in a manner that is accessible and appealing to wide audiences, and you’ll develop links with local arts organisations and secondary schools in Cardiff and beyond to share your work. The supervisory team will guide you to connect and visit with schools and other organisations. They’ll also draw on their experience of public engagement in supporting you to invite Caleb Femi to the university and to host him at one or more public poetry and music events.

Fostering your career development and leadership skills will be a key priority of the supervisory team, who will ensure that you develop diverse work and academic experience. You’ll also have access to training offered by Cardiff University’s Doctoral Academy.

Research questions