Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatia...

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was t ...  Show more

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Ind ...  Show more

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 ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet W.B. Yeats and Irish politics. Yeats lived through a period of great change in Ireland from the collapse of the home rule bill through to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the partitioning of the country. In May 1916, 15 men were shot by the B ...  Show more

Harris Feinsod joins the podcast to talk about William Carlos Williams, his great book of 1923, Spring and All, and one of its strange and unforgettable poems, "To Elsie."Harris is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He i ...  Show more

This episode deals with themes and events surrounding the Northern Ireland conflict. As such, this episode may be traumatic or emotional for some listeners. Paul McCartney doesn’t view himself as a writer of protest songs. But the events of Bloody Sunday sufficiently moved him to ...  Show more