In the first episode in a new series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
In the final episode of their series, 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.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney
Mark Ford, Seamus Perry and Joanna Biggs consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In their first episode together, recorded in 2017, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry looked at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet much written about in the archive of the London Review of Books.