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Political Poems

London Review of Books
  • 5.0 (2)
  • BOOKS
  • UPDATED MONTHLY

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford consider poems that have been understood, admired and perhaps criticised for their politics, ranging across several hundred years of literary history. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Political Poems is part of the Close Readings podcast collection from the London Review of Books. Listen to this episode ad free, and get full access to all our Close Readings series, including more from Mark and Seamus: 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

  1. ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot

    12/28/2024

    ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot

    In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds a model in Little Gidding, a small village that for a time in the 17th century served as an Anglican commune before its closure under Puritan scrutiny. Mark and Seamus explore how Eliot’s poetics heighten our sense of the liminal and mystical, and how, by ‘scrambling our brains’, Eliot’s brilliant rhetoric subsumes his bizarre politics. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings  Further reading in the LRB: Frank Kermode: Disintegration https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n02/frank-kermode/disintegration Helen Thaventhiran: Things Ill Done and Undone https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/helen-thaventhiran/things-ill-done-and-undone Tobias Gregory: By All Possible Art https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n24/tobias-gregory/by-all-possible-art Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    11 min
  2. ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney

    11/28/2024

    ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney

    As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’. A dreamlike reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Station Island’ describes Heaney’s encounters with the ghosts of childhood acquaintances, literary heroes and victims of the Troubles. Seamus and Mark explore Heaney’s unusually autobiographical poem, which wrestles with the inescapability of politics. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings  Further reading in the LRB: Paul Muldoon: Sweaney Peregraine https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n20/paul-muldoon/sweaney-peregraine Seamus Perry: We Did and We Didn’t https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t John Kerrigan: Hand and Foot https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/john-kerrigan/hand-and-foot Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    12 min
  3. 'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth

    10/28/2024

    'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth

    Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Further reading in the LRB: Seamus Perry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes E.P. Thompson https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis Colin Burrow: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man Marilyn Butler https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground Thomas Keymer https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    12 min
  4. 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

    09/28/2024

    'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

    In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hill Ian Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    13 min
  5. 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones

    08/28/2024

    'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones

    ‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society. Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation Subscribe to Close Readings: In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast to unlock all the episodes; In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/ppsignup Read more in the LRB: Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    57 min
  6. 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman

    07/28/2024

    'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman

    Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup Read Mark Ford on Whitman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n06/mark-ford/petty-grotesques Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    11 min
  7. 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen

    06/28/2024

    'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen

    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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup Further reading in the LRB: Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    11 min
  8. 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    05/28/2024

    'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    13 min
  9. 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    04/28/2024

    'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    11 min
  10. 'Easter 1916' by W.B. Yeats

    03/28/2024

    'Easter 1916' by W.B. Yeats

    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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    12 min
  11. 'Spain 1937' by W.H. Auden

    02/28/2024

    'Spain 1937' by W.H. Auden

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

    43 min
  12. 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' by Andrew Marvell

    01/28/2024

    'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' by Andrew Marvell

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

    35 min
  • 12 Episodes

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About

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford consider poems that have been understood, admired and perhaps criticised for their politics, ranging across several hundred years of literary history. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Political Poems is part of the Close Readings podcast collection from the London Review of Books. Listen to this episode ad free, and get full access to all our Close Readings series, including more from Mark and Seamus: 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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