Mark Ford and Seamus Perry explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Their series will consider the elegies of Milton, Hardy, Bishop, Plath and others at their most intimate and expressive. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Poets discussed in this series include: Milton, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Denise Riley, Anne Bradstreet, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Ben Jonson, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin and more.
Love and Death
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Podcast Overview
Mark Ford and Seamus Perry explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Their series will consider the elegies of Milton, Hardy, Bishop, Plath and others at their most intimate and expressive. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Poets discussed in this series include: Milton, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Denise Riley, Anne Bradstreet, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Ben Jonson, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin and more.
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Publishing Since
1/7/2025
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Recent Episodes
December 22, 2025
Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah
Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah. Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Find tickets to Seamus's LRB Winter Lecture in London here: https://lrb.me/perrywlpod Further reading in the LRB: Freya Johnston on Samuel Johnson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/freya-johnston/i-m-coming-my-tetsie! Patricia Beer on Hopkins: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n11/patricia-beer/what-he-meant-by-happiness
November 24, 2025
Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon
Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined this allusive, rhetorical style with a poignant realism to recreate his subjects. They then turn to the more self-reflexive, oblique elegies of Paul Muldoon, who has reinvented the form in richly-patterned, playful poems such as ‘The Soap Pig’ and ‘Incantata’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld More in the LRB: Thom Gunn's 'Lament': https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn1 Colm Tóibín on Gunn: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn2 Michael Nott: Thom Gunn in New York: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn3 Markl Ford on Muldoon: https://lrb.me/ldep12muldoon1
October 27, 2025
Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler
When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Arnold's 'Thyrsis': https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats More in the LRB: Seamus Perry on Auden: https://lrb.me/ldep11auden Stefan Collini on Arnold: https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold
14 total episodes available
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