University’s warning over ‘sexist’ Keats and Wordsworth poetry

A UNIVERSITY has slapped a trigger warning on some of literature’s greatest poets because their work contains ‘representations of sexism and misogyny’.

Bath Spa University has told students that poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Alexander Pope have the potential to ‘disturb’ or ‘distress’.

Details of the warnings issued on the university’s Romance and Revolution course were obtained under Freedom of Information rules.

Without identifying specific works, they state that some verses by Pope contain ‘representations of sexual assault, violence, sexism and misogyny’, while works by Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley feature ‘violence, sexism and misogyny, death, mental illness, self-harm and suicide’.

Criticising the move, Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, said: ‘This university plays with words and ideas like a fool drunk on their folly.

‘These four poets are… key authors in the human aspiration to selfexpression. Far from hating others, they found meaning for us all.’

Bath Spa University argues that the warnings ‘ensure a safe and inclusive environment’.

A spokesman added that their use is considered on a case-by-case basis by tutors in the ‘context of their knowledge and understanding’ of a particular group of students.