Avsnitt
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Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney
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Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perrypp
Thomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female readership to the abolitionist cause. Browning was the direct descendant of slave owners in Jamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and her dramatic monologue presents a searing attack on the hypocrisy of ‘liberty’ as enshrined in the United States constitution. Mark and Seamus look at the origins of the poem and its story, and its place among other abolitionist narratives of the time.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB
Matthew Bevis: Foiled by Pleasure: https://lrb.me/bevispp
Alethea Hayter: Reader, I married you: https://lrb.me/hayterpp
John Bayley: A Question of Breathing: https://lrb.me/bayleypp
Colin Grant: Leave them weeping: https://lrb.me/grantpp
Fara Dabhoiwala: My Runaway Slave, Reward Two Guineas: https://lrb.me/dabhoiwalapp
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Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and interrogates his own attitude to nationalist violence. Mark and Seamus discuss Yeats’s reflections on the value of political commitment, his embrace of the role of national bard and the origin of the poem’s most famous line.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Terry Eagleton: https://lrb.me/eagletonpp
Colm Tóibín: https://lrb.me/toibinpp
Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/kermode2pp
Tom Paulin: https://lrb.me/paulinpp
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In their second episode, Mark and Seamus look at W.H. Auden's ‘Spain’. Auden travelled to Spain in January 1937 to support the Republican efforts in the civil war, and composed the poem shortly after his return a few months later to raise money for Medical Aid for Spain. It became a rallying cry in the fight against fascism, but was also heavily criticised, not least by George Orwell, for the phrase (in its first version) of ‘necessary murder’. Mark and Seamus discuss the poem’s Marxist presentation of history, its distinctly non-Marxist language, and why Auden ultimately condemned it as ‘a lie’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney: Sounding Auden: https://lrb.me/heaneyaudencrpod
Alan Bennett: The Wrong Blond: https://lrb.me/bennettaudencrpod
Seamus Perry: That's what Wystan says: https://lrb.me/perryaudencrpod
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In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read the poem here
Further reading in the LRB:
Blair Worden: Double Tongued: https://lrb.me/wordenpp
Frank Kermode: Hard Labour: https://lrb.me/kermodepp
David Norbrook: Political Verse: https://lrb.me/norbrookpp
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