Close Readings

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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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.

Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry, for the eighth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1. They consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War, and drawing on the LRB archive to talk about her funniness, ruthlessness, and uninhibited willingness to go anywhere to win the argument. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 March 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode seven of their first series of Modern-ish Poets Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 December 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the sixth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A. E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shropshire Lad, with its expression of the agony of thwarted love which can find no resolution, became a runaway bestseller during and after the First World War. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 October 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the fifth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1 Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ and a famous performer of her poetry, considering the despair that underlines her best work, its tonal slipperiness, her exceptional facility with rhyme and off-rhyme, and her use of faux-naif personas and perspectives. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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 our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps 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.