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.
All content for Love and Death is the property of London Review of Books and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
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.
‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
Love and Death
15 minutes
8 months ago
‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Further reading in the LRB:
John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre
https://lrb.me/ldgray1
Tony Harrison: ‘V.’
https://lrb.me/ldgray2
Read the texts online:
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Love and Death
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.
