Seamus Perry and Mark Ford consider poems which have been understood, admired and perhaps criticised for their politics, ranging across several hundred years of literary history.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: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...
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...
Published 10/28/24
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...
Published 09/28/24