Rita Dove was the first African American US Poet Laureate, and the youngest, serving from 1993-95. She has received the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama and the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, making her the only poet to have received both presidential medals. She has received many academic and literary honours and is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Coinciding with Black History Month, the lecture will explore how poetry can pull lives from the shadows. The lecture takes as its starting point what might have remained a footnote in musical history – the fact that Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, his Violin Sonata No.9, was originally titled ‘Sonata Mulattica’, and composed in honour of a now-forgotten musical wunderkind, a ‘mulatto’ virtuoso violinist called George Bridgetower.

Dove has pieced together Bridgetower’s story, with its underlying theme of racism, for her own lyric narrative, Sonata Mulattica. Exploring the intersection between history and imagination, Dove will describe how she reconstructed Bridgetower’s life, working from historical sources and filling in the gaps. “Poetry is not about biographical truth, it’s about an emotional truth,” explains Dove. Being wrapped up in facts, is to be trapped by facts. The poet needs to fantasise, speculate, and “eavesdrop on the gods”.