'Gaudy Havoc' Talk by Dr Sarah Parker

A talk by Loughborough’s Dr Sarah Parker will offer the first detailed critical discussion of the twentieth-century poet Iris Tree.

Despite being a frequent contributor to the Sitwells’ Wheels anthology, Tree is today remembered—when she is remembered at all— as a model and muse for other modernist artists, rather than as a poet in her own right.

This paper will suggest this neglect is due to the fact that Tree’s poetry employs aesthetics that trouble the reader trained to look for modernist ‘restraint’. Instead, her poems are verbose and allusive, drawing on multiple performative identities inspired by late-Victorian Decadence and theatrical masquerade. 

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