In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer’s sexually voracious professional widow, stealth preacher, vivid storyteller and teacher of love, the Wife of Bath.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Tom Shippey

Sally Mapstone

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.

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In the second episode in their series, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first book in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Mary Wellesley: This place is pryson

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.

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In the first episode of their miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. In the stories of Mary’s life she leads a wild and licentious youth before exiling herself to serve penitence in the desert. There she meets Zosimas, an ascetic monk, and teaches him the value of an imperfect life. Several accounts of her life were written in the Middle Ages, including one in Old English that appears in a manuscript with Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints.

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This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in September 2021.

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In the final episode of series one of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionalism’ came to exemplify a generation of Americans’ collective trauma; the poet who changed everything, but whose star has somehow fallen in recent years.

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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For the ninth episode of their series, Seamus and Mark discuss the life and work of Seamus Heaney, whose first collection, Death of Naturalist, established him immediately as a leading poetic voice in world in which modernism seemed to have run its course. They look at how his work draws extensively on his childhood, its use of poetic sounds to bind him to his native ground, its intricate engagement with myth, and his questioning of what sort of poetry is appropriate for someone in his social and historical moment.

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in May 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry, for the eighth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1. They consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War, and drawing on the LRB archive to talk about her funniness, ruthlessness, and uninhibited willingness to go anywhere to win the argument.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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In episode seven of their first series of Modern-ish Poets Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction.

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in December 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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In the sixth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A. E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shropshire Lad, with its expression of the agony of thwarted love which can find no resolution, became a runaway bestseller during and after the First World War.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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In the fifth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1 Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ and a famous performer of her poetry, considering the despair that underlines her best work, its tonal slipperiness, her exceptional facility with rhyme and off-rhyme, and her use of faux-naif personas and perspectives.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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In the fourth episode of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Thomas Hardy, with its blend of bitterness of tenderness, its intense dramatisations of loss and grief, and its inversion of traditional tropes of love poetry to anticipate the attitudes of later 20th century writers.

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

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in June 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.

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