The poetry of Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch: Poems from an Attic
Join us to discover the fascinating and largely unknown poetry of Iris Murdoch. Live online lecture with Miles Leeson, Sunday 31 May 2026.
Miles writes:
In 2016, an extraordinary literary discovery quietly took place: hundreds of previously unseen poems by Iris Murdoch were uncovered in notebooks stored in the attic of her former home in Oxford by myself and my colleague Anne Rowe. What followed was years of meticulous transcription and editorial work, resulting in Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936–1995 - a collection that transforms how we see Murdoch’s literary development. This Literature Cambridge event offers a rare opportunity to encounter Murdoch anew - not as the celebrated novelist of The Sea, The Sea or the formidable moral philosopher of The Sovereignty of Good, but as a poet whose work runs parallel to everything else she wrote.
The poems span nearly sixty years, allowing us to trace the evolution of a voice that is by turns lyrical, philosophical, and intensely self-aware. Murdoch’s earliest poems, written during her school years, already contain the obsessions that would populate her novels. In ‘The Diver,’ a figure plunges into the sea in search of a hidden pearl - a striking early image of the descent toward truth that would animate her fiction and philosophy alike. As the collection moves into the 1940s, the tone darkens. Murdoch’s wartime experiences - working in London and later with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration - leave their mark. Poems such as ‘Thoughts Around Nash’s Wild Stones’ and ‘Bayswater Tube Station’ turn ordinary environments into symbolic spaces. The everyday becomes metaphysical; the visible world takes on unseen meaning. Readers familiar with her early novels will recognise this shift immediately: the poetic imagination is already at work, shaping the moral landscapes of her later fiction.
By the 1950s, Murdoch’s poetic voice reaches full maturity. She writes with remarkable formal control, moving confidently between sonnets, ballads, and lyrical sequences. Yet these are not exercises in tradition for its own sake. For Murdoch, form is a moral instrument - a way of disciplining attention and refining perception. The poems of this period, particularly the sequence ‘Tu es mon mal,’ explore love as both revelation and illusion. Desire, in Murdoch’s hands, is never simple: it is entangled with questions of truth, with freedom, and with self-deception. This tension - between love and vision, between the self and what lies beyond it - is central to all of Murdoch’s work, and it is one of the key themes we will explore in this session. Her philosophy insists that morality begins in attention: in the effort to see the world as it truly is, rather than as we wish it to be. The poems contained in the collection enact this effort in miniature. They are not confessional in the usual sense, but they are certainly deeply personal. The offer glimpses of her emotional life while resisting easy self-exposure.
One of the most striking aspects of Poems from an Attic is how seamlessly Murdoch moves between abstraction and sensuous detail. A philosophical idea is never left floating; it is anchored in image, in rhythm, and in voice. A dead bird, a musical evening, reflections on Ireland: these become occasions for reflection on love and loss, as well as – crucially – moral clarity. In later poems such as ‘Fox’ or ‘The Unpruned Pear Tree,’ the writing becomes quieter, yet no less exacting, until we reach the heartbreaking ‘Macaw in the Snow’. The influence of her later philosophical work -particularly the writing of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals - is clear as perception itself becomes the central subject. Recent critical reception has underscored just how important this body of work is. The New York Times review by Dwight Garner highlighted the poems’ ‘metaphysical ambition’ and their resistance to the dominant trends of post-war British poetry. Where figures such as Philip Larkin pursued a pared-down realism, Murdoch remained committed to a richer, more expansive lyric tradition - one that draws on Donne, Herbert, Yeats, and W. H. Auden; all figures she was able to discuss at length. Yet her poetry is never derivative and is unmistakably her own: both intellectually daring and morally serious.
Photo by Buddy An, Unsplash
What emerges from this collection is a poet of real significance. The poems in the collection offer a kind of hidden biography - charting Murdoch’s emotional life, her friendships, her intellectual commitments, and her married life - while also deepening our understanding of her novels and philosophical writings. They reveal, above all, a remarkable unity across her work. Philosophy, fiction, theology and poetry are not separate domains for Murdoch, but different expressions of the same central concern: the search for truth and the discipline of attention.
This session with Literature Cambridge will highlight these discoveries, combining close reading with broader critical context. We will explore key poems in detail, consider their relationship to Murdoch’s philosophical ideas, and reflect on what it means to think of her as a ‘philosophical poet.’ Along the way we will also address questions of form, influence, and reception, situating Murdoch within both literary and intellectual traditions. Whether you are new to Murdoch or have long admired her work, this session offers something genuinely new: the chance to encounter a different version of the writer we thought we knew. As the New York Times observed, these poems do not simply supplement her achievement, they reshape it.
Join us to explore this remarkable collection, and to discover why Murdoch’s poetry matters now more than ever.
Dr Miles Leeson
Director, Iris Murdoch Research Centre and co-editor of Poems from an Attic.
Join us for Miles’ Live online lecture on Poems from an Attic, Sunday 31 May 2026.
