Close Readings

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You

⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets1⁠

Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell

⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets2⁠

Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland

⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets3

Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose

⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets4⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld⁠

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.

Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.

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/applecrff

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll1⁠

Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll2⁠

Marina Warner: Doubly Damned

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll3⁠

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.

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

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Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this experience and the breakdown that ensued in his 20s, and the boldness of his life and thought from his views on socialism and the rights of women to his unwavering devotion to his wife, Harriet Taylor, the co-author of 'On Liberty' and other works.

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:

Sissela Bok on Mill's 'Autobiography':

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n06/sissela-bok/his-father-s-children

Alasdair MacIntyre: Mill's Forgotten Victory

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n20/alasdair-macintyre/john-stuart-mill-s-forgotten-victory

Panbkaj Mishra: Bland Fanatics

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics

Get in touch: [email protected]

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When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.

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

Read more in the LRB:

David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1

John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2

Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3

Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4

Buy this book from the London Review Bookshop: ⁠https://lrb.me/crbooklist⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠

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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 to 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

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.

Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:

https://lrb.me/travel26pod

Further reading in the LRB:

Salman Rushdie: Calvino

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino1⁠

James Butler: Infinite Artichoke⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino2⁠

Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism

⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino3⁠

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.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott.

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

Read 'Circles' here:

https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/circles/

Read more in the LRB:

Tony Tanner on the life of Emerson:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/tony-tanner/arctic-habits

Colin Burrow on the American canon:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/colin-burrow/the-magic-bloomschtick

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

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

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.

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

Read more in the LRB:

Thomas Keymer on Peacock

https://lrb.me/napeacock1

Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act

https://lrb.me/napeacock2

Audiobooks from the LRB:

https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

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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://lrb.me/ldch1⁠

Blair Worden on puritanism

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch2⁠

Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch3⁠

Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch4

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld

Get in touch: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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: A Spot of Firm Government

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift1⁠

Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift2⁠

Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift3

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.

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff

Get in touch: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices