Close Readings

In episode two of Among the Ancients, Tom and Emily turn to Homer’s Odyssey. They discuss the twisting, turning nature of both the narrative and its hero, the poem’s complex interrogation of the idea of ‘home’, and the violence Odysseus brings with him on his return from the Trojan War. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Dir...

In episode two of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina turn the pages of the Exeter Book, a remarkable 10th century manuscript containing numerous poems and riddles, some of which are written in the voices of women. They consider in particular the enigmatic and beautiful ‘Wife’s Lament’ and ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, and their numerous interpretations, and compare them to an extraordinary collection of l...

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry start their series, The Long and Short, with Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, a weird and disturbing poem about obsession that Tennyson himself was obsessed by. He would recite it in full at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than once, to friends and foes alike – even though it received notoriously bad reviews when it was published. This episode considers why the poem meant so much to...

In their first episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer's Iliad: its depictions of anger and grief, of capricious gods and warriors’ bodies, and the sheer narrative force of Homer’s epic of the Trojan War. Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from the rest of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: D...

Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu start their Medieval Beginnings series with Beowulf, a tale of monsters and heroes that is also a complex collection of interwoven stories about war and the conduct of a warrior society. They consider the poem’s preoccupations with kingship and a pagan past seen through the eyes of a Christian culture, as well as many of the mysteries which still surround its, n...

On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus finish the second series of Modern-ish Poets by considering how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https:...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through her damaged and marginalised characters. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq I...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their series with a look at the life and work of W.B. Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish culture, to his shift towards the Modernist experiment, and preoccupation with the ‘murderousness of the world’. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/...

Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O’Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson—her dashes, death instinct and obliquity. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the island poet and playwright surrounded by an oceanic consciousness, whose writing recognises at once the terrible gulfs between peoples and our common predicament. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: htt...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness, in the fourth episode of series two of Modern-ish Poets. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings...

In the third episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, in whose poems the personal becomes not only political, but epic. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closerea...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional poet, whose version of the American wilderness myth, full of misch...

In the first episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and to this series ad free, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other p...

In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought to be the first autobiography in English. To listen to Mary and Irina's series, Medieval Beginnings, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://app...

In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer’s sexually voracious professional widow, stealth preacher, vivid storyteller and teacher of love, the Wife of Bath. To listen to Mary and Irina's series, Medieval Beginnings, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadi...

In the second episode in their series, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first book in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman. To listen to Mary and Irina's series, Medieval Beginnings, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast...

In the first episode of their miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. In the stories of Mary’s life she leads a wild and licentious youth before exiling herself to serve penitence in the desert. There she meets Zosimas, an ascetic monk, and...

In the final episode of series one of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionalism’ came to exemplify a generation of Americans’ collective trauma; the poet who changed everything, but whose star has somehow fallen in recent years. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in...

For the ninth episode of their series, Seamus and Mark discuss the life and work of Seamus Heaney, whose first collection, Death of Naturalist, established him immediately as a leading poetic voice in world in which modernism seemed to have run its course. They look at how his work draws extensively on his childhood, its use of poetic sounds to bind him to his native ground, its intricate engageme...

Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry, for the eighth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1. They consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War, and drawing on the LRB archive to talk about her funniness, ruthlessness, and uninhibited willingn...

In episode seven of their first series of Modern-ish Poets Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts h...

In the sixth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A. E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shropshire Lad, with its expression of the agony of thwarted love which can find no resolution, became a runaway bestseller during and after the First World War. This is an extract from the episode. To liste...

In the fifth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1 Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ and a famous performer of her poetry, considering the despair that underlines her best work, its tonal slipperiness, her exceptional facility with rhyme and off-rhyme, and her use of faux-naif personas and perspectives. This is an extract fro...