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...

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...

‘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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...