Close Readings

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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in November 2020.

Further reading on MacNiece in the LRB:

Ian Hamilton

John Kerrigan

Marilyn Butler

Nick Laird

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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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in September 2020.

Further reading on Rich in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose

Stephanie Burt

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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 mischief and foreboding, took him to packed concert halls and a presidential inauguration.

To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2020.

Further reading on Frost in the LRB:

Leo Marx

Helen Vendler

Peter Howarth

Matthew Bevis

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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 all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2020.

Further reading on Hopkins in the LRB:

Helen Vendler

Patricia Beer

John Bayley

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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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Barbara Newman

Susan Brigden

Tom Shippey

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in November 2021.

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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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Tom Shippey

Sally Mapstone

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.

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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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Mary Wellesley: This place is pryson

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.

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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 teaches him the value of an imperfect life. Several accounts of her life were written in the Middle Ages, including one in Old English that appears in a manuscript with Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints.

Sign up to our Close Readings subscription here: https://lrb.me/closereadings

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in September 2021.

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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 full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: lrb.me/closereadings

Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 engagement with myth, and his questioning of what sort of poetry is appropriate for someone in his social and historical moment.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: lrb.me/closereadings

Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in May 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.