Political Poems

‘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 ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-marketThis episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJkFind more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundationSubscribe to Close Readings:In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast to unlock all the episodes;In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead more in the LRB:Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sidJacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defacedJohn Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness

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 vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.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 Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead Mark Ford on Whitman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n06/mark-ford/petty-grotesques

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 Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.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 Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead more in the LRB:Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perryppThomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp

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 place among other abolitionist narratives of the time.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 Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead more in the LRBMatthew Bevis: Foiled by Pleasure: https://lrb.me/bevisppAlethea Hayter: Reader, I married you: https://lrb.me/hayterppJohn Bayley: A Question of Breathing: https://lrb.me/bayleyppColin Grant: Leave them weeping: https://lrb.me/grantppFara Dabhoiwala: My Runaway Slave, Reward Two Guineas: https://lrb.me/dabhoiwalapp

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 of the role of national bard and the origin of the poem’s most famous line.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 Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead more in the LRB:Terry Eagleton: https://lrb.me/eagletonppColm Tóibín: https://lrb.me/toibinppFrank Kermode: https://lrb.me/kermode2ppTom Paulin: https://lrb.me/paulinpp

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 presentation of history, its distinctly non-Marxist language, and why Auden ultimately condemned it as ‘a lie’.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 Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead more in the LRB:Seamus Heaney: Sounding Auden: https://lrb.me/heaneyaudencrpodAlan Bennett: The Wrong Blond: https://lrb.me/bennettaudencrpodSeamus Perry: That's what Wystan says: https://lrb.me/perryaudencrpod

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 up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupRead the poem hereFurther reading in the LRB:Blair Worden: Double Tongued: https://lrb.me/wordenppFrank Kermode: Hard Labour: https://lrb.me/kermodeppDavid Norbrook: Political Verse: https://lrb.me/norbrookpp