Close Readings

In the fourth episode of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Thomas Hardy, with its blend of bitterness of tenderness, its intense dramatisations of loss and grief, and its inversion of traditional tropes of love poetry to anticipate the attitudes of later 20th century writers.

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 June 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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

For episode three of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus look at the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, the east-coast American poet who enjoyed a limited audience, and published relatively little, in her lifetime, but whose reputation has grown enormously since her death. They discuss her exploratory approach to form, the way she domesticates what seem like heroic and mythical enterprises, and the dialectic in her work between the emotional disruption inherited from her childhood and her artistic commitment to perfectionism.

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 November 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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

In the second episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss life and work of W. H. Auden, from the influence of his parents and his political development, to how his poetry emerged from a meeting of English tradition with high modernism, and its formal response to the fractured nature of his times.

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 their first episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry look at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet written about extensively in the archive of the London Review of Books.

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

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

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