The notoriously “opaque, hermetic, impenetrable [and] forbidding” poetry of Jeremy Prynne might lead one to assume that his character was similarly austere. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as I discovered during my first term studying English literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in autumn 1979.
Sitting in his book-lined study, as he rigorously dissected Sir Walter Raleigh’s As You Came from the Holy Land, was an experience I shall never forget. Verse by verse, then line by line, and word by word, he unravelled the hidden meanings within this deceptively simple poem.
By the end of our session on Shakespeare’s notoriously ambiguous Sonnet 94: “They that have power to hurt and will do none”, I felt as if my mind had been given a complete makeover.
