Close Readings

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...

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...