- Monday, 9 November 2026
- Wine reception from 5.30pm; lecture at 6pm
- Rivers Suite, Craiglockhart campus
First World War poetry is often a poetry of remembrance: a remembrance of the dead and of the traditions they fought to defend. But it is sometimes also a poetry of forgetting, of the need to live and to move on from the ways of thinking that had brought about the war's catastrophe. Taking its title from a poem by Roderick Watson Kerr, this talk will explore these competing ideas in the work of several of the Scottish combatant and non-combatant poets of the war, among them Kerr, Joseph Lee, J B Salmond (who was treated at Craiglockhart), Violet Jacob, and Mary Symon.
David Goldie is President of the Association for Scottish Literature. He is the editor or co-editor of books including Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945 (2014), Scotland and the Nineteenth-Century World (2012), and Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2004). He taught for many years at the University of Strathclyde.
This lecture continues the annual series of Remembrance lectures at Edinburgh Napier University, marking the historical significance of Craiglockhart as a War Hospital during the First World War, famously the meeting place of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. We also remember our late colleague Catherine Walker, who was for many years curator of the War Poets Collection.
Funding comes from the Centre for Arts, Media and Culture and the Centre for Military Research, Education & Public Engagement, and by private donation.
The event will be held in the Rivers Suite at Edinburgh Napier's Craiglockhart campus. There will be a wine reception from 5.30pm; the lecture will start around 6pm. The event will also be streamed via Teams.
Register to attend in-person or online