Close Readings

In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ is taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, and feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sen...

Emily and Tom follow Virgil with one of his contemporaries, Horace, whose poetry played an important political role in the early years of Augustan Rome and has had an enormous influence on subsequent European lyric verse. They consider the original meanings of some of Horace’s famous phrases – carpe diem, in medias res, nunc est bibendum – and look at the ways his often complex poetics interrogate...

From the first recorded instance of the word ‘fart’ in English, to nuanced vignettes of sexual power dynamics, the numerous Middle English lyrics that have survived down the centuries, often scribbled in the margins of more ‘serious’ texts, offer a vivid snapshot of everyday medieval life. In the tenth episode of Medieval Beginings, Irina and Mary analyse several of these short, fleeting verses, p...

Originally conceived as a film script, 'Gaudete' is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, 'Gaudete' shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer M...

In the ninth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom arrive at Virgil, focusing on his 12-book epic the Aeneid, which describes the wanderings of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy. They discuss the political background to Virgil’s life, which saw the fall of the Roman Republic, and the complex, ambiguous space his poetry inhabits, blending the mythical and historical, the geogra...

Chaucer’s 14th century tale of ‘double sorrow’, Troilus and Criseyde, set during the siege of Troy, is the subject of Irina and Mary’s ninth episode of Medieval Beginnings. Based largely on Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, Chaucer’s novelistic long poem displays a psychological realism that would make Henry James envious, and, with the matchmaker-uncle Pandarus, introduces a character of startling and o...

James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his...

In their eighth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at a contemporary of Catullus, Lucretius, and the only poem we have from him, De rerum natura (The Nature of Things), which sets out ideas about how to live one’s life based on the Epicurean philosophical tradition, embracing friends, gardens, materialism and moderation. Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episod...

In this episode of Medieval Beginnings, Irina and Mary jump to the 14th century for an introspective Arthurian romance about a knight trying to live up to his perfect reputation. The mysterious and intricate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is perhaps best understood as a series of games within games, in which our hero, a recurring character throughout medieval literature, is never sure what advent...

Seamus and Mark step into the counterculture with two long poems, ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, by Allen Ginsberg, a Beat poet-celebrity with a utopian vision for an America rescued from its corrupted institutions and vested interests. Seamus and Mark discuss some of Ginsberg’s influences – including Whitman, Carlos Williams, O’Hara and Blake – and the far-reaching impact of his work, as well as Mark’s ow...

For the second half of their Among the Ancients series, Emily and Tom move to Ancient Rome, starting with the late Republican poet Catullus. Described by Tennyson, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘the tenderest of Roman poets’, Catullus combined a self-conscious technical virtuosity with a broad emotional range and a taste for paradox, often using obscene diction to skirt across the boundaries of gender...

In their seventh episode of Medieval Beginnings, Irina and Mary continue their run of Romances with the Middle English Havelok the Dane, a double Cinderella story of sex, fishing and surprisingly graphic violence, written at the end of the 13th century and set in a pre-Conquest, legendary English past. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, s...

Controversial, compulsive, and overwhelmingly charismatic, D.H. Lawrence continues to exert an undeniable magnetism through his novels and poetry. But, as Mark argues in this episode, the quintessential Lawrence lies in his shorter fiction. Focusing on five stories that span Lawrence’s career, Mark and Seamus discuss the strange mix of uninhibitedness and meticulous detail that make Lawrence’s wor...

In their sixth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom discuss the comedies of Aristophanes, in particular Clouds and Lysistrata. How did an Aristophanes comedy differ from a satyr play? Was he a conservative or a radical? And what happened to comedy after Aristophanes? Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Clo...

For the sixth episode in their Medieval Beginnings series, Mary and Irina go full Romance with one of the most elaborate and surprising narrative poems in medieval literature, Le Roman de Silence, a complex, 13th-century Old French tale about gender, power and transformation. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Ap...

In their fifth episode, Mark and Seamus reach their first 20th century poet of the series, the Ohio-born, New York-loving ad man Hart Crane, and his epic 1930 work The Bridge. Directly inspired by The Waste Land, The Bridge sought to address modernity, as Eliot had done, with all its conflicts, contradictions and difficulties, but infuse it with a Whitman-esque expression of American greatness. Th...

Euripides was the youngest of the fifth-century Athenian tragedians, and is often described as the most radical. But how daring was he? How far did he push the boundaries of dramatic form? Focusing on Medea and Hippolytus, Emily and Tom discuss the ways Euripides sought to shock his audiences, make them laugh, and explore their anxieties in a time of cultural change. Non-subscribers can only hear...

If a Middle Ages full of castles, jousts, hawking, illicit love affairs and playful singing in the meadows is what you’re looking for, then look no further than the Lais of Marie de France. These 12th century love stories, written in Anglo-Norman by a writer who was unusually keen to make her name known, describe noble stories of passion, devotion, betrayal, self-sacrifice and magical transformati...

In episode four of The Long and Short, Mark and Seamus turn to the squarely modernist Katherine Mansfield, whose writing famously attracted the envy of Virginia Woolf. They discuss how in Mansfield's work the modernist story makes a decisive break from its 19th century predecessors. At turns lyrical, ruthless, moving and darkly comic, these stories demonstrate her knack for close observation and m...

In the fourth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom ask: what was it like to go to the theatre in Athens in 468 BC? And how far do modern ideas about tragedy, derived from Aristotle, apply to Sophocles’ plays? They then look in more detail at Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone and what the plays have to say about agency and knowledge, and consider issues particular to Sophocles’ time, including...

In the fourth episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina climb inside a tiny cell to explore the Ancrene Wisse, a guidebook written in the early 13th century, originally intended for three anchoresses, but which enjoyed a much wider audience (there was even a copy in Henry VIII’s library). This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up he...

The third episode of The Long and Short turns to the short stories of Henry James. Mark and Seamus look in particular at ‘The Aspern Papers’, which, like Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, offers a diagnosis of obsession, in this case through a sensuous, excruciating and often comedic Venetian psychodrama. Mark and Seamus discuss the emergence of the short story at the end of the 19th century, and how certain fea...

In the third episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom move from epic to lyric, with the poems of Sappho, or what remains of them. They consider what we know, and don’t know, about her life, and how her poetry challenges the heroic tradition, both in its subversion of Homeric ideas of war and nostos, and in its playful use of language. Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the epi...

In the third episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina explore the much-chronicled life of St Cuthbert, as told by the most famous writer of the early medieval period, the so-called Venerable Bede. From Cuthbert’s childhood interest in naked handstands, to his later work as a charismatic preacher who could elicit total confession, and as a hermit who enjoyed the assistance of friendly sea ott...

In the second episode of The Long and Short, Mark and Seamus turn to Walt Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’, from Leaves of Grass (1855), for Mark ‘one of the most exciting things literature has to offer’. They discuss the extraordinary physicality and exuberance of this seminal American poem, its relationship with urbanism, capitalism and sexuality, and its Johnny Appleseed-spirit, among many other thin...