This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions.

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

Read the poems here:

Ben Jonson: On My First Son

https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld

Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld

Geoffrey Hill: September Song

https://lrb.me/hillcrld

Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia

https://lrb.me/bishopcrld

Read more in the LRB:

Blair Worden on Ben Jonson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben

Blair Worden on puritanism

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben

Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n04/colin-burrow/rancorous-old-sod

Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose

Next episode:

Two elegies by Thomas Gray:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes

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Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think.

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/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Further reading in the LRB:

Terry Eagleton:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n16/terry-eagleton/a-spot-of-firm-government

Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/clare-bucknell/oven-ready-children

Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n08/thomas-keymer/carry-up-your-coffee-boldly

Next episode: Marco Polo’s Il Milione and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

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In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doctrine, from sexual relations to the Trinity, and consider why Feuerbach would never have described himself as an atheist. They also look at George Eliot’s remarkable translation of the work, published only thirteen years after the original, which not only ensured Feuerbach’s influence in the Anglophone world but invented a new philosophical vocabulary in English for German thought.

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/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

James Wood: What next?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n08/james-wood/what-s-next

Terry Eagleton: George Eliot

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak

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On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.

In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

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/applecrna

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

Next episode: Clare Bucknell and guests on Thomas Love Peacock’s Crotchet Castle.

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Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable, pre-Christian form to honour his friend.

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

Read more in the LRB:

Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'):

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n05/colin-burrow/shall-i-go-on

Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism):

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/freya-johnston/own-your-ignorance

Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton):

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads

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The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living.

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/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: Travelling Text

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/marina-warner/travelling-text

Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n06/steven-connor/one-s-thousand-one-nightinesses

William Gass: A Book at Bedtime

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n21/william-gass/a-book-at-bedtime 

Marina Warner: ‘The Restless One’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/the-restless-one

NEXT EPISODE: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift, out on Monday 10 February.

Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsff

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka.

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/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1

James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2

Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3

Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4

James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.

Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.

NEXT EPISODE: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach, out on Monday 3 February.

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

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Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.

The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anthony Trollope (TBD)

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing 

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Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing.

The first episode will come out on Monday 20 January, on Milton's ‘Lycidas’.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

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Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living.

The first episode will come out on Monday 13 January, on The Thousand and One Nights.

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

Texts for the first four episodes:

The Thousand and One Nights (Yasmine Seale’s translation)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The Travels of Marco Polo (no particular translation) and Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (William Weaver translation)

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

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