Political Poems

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 depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.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://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hillIan Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up

‘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.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/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

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 politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.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/ppapplesignupIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignupFurther reading in the LRB:Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney

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.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/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.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/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.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/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