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.
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13.
Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read the poems:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm
Further reading and listening from the LRB:
On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare
Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts
Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly
Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy
Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
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.
