Critical Readings

Released on 22 June 2020:

The panel reviews selections from the first six cantos of Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with particular attention to Guyon’s interactions with Belphoebe (and her connexion to Diana and Venus), the character of Palmer, and the return of Archimago.

Released on 15 June 2020:

The panel examines the second half of the first book of The Faerie Queene, with particular attention to the foundations of textual analysis, demonstrating readings grounded in the texts themselves and in the material and tropes available to the author.

Released on 8 June 2020:

The panel welcomes two additional experts to begin a several-month-long survey of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in its entirety, in this episode examining Spenser’s personal history, his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, and the first half of Book I.

Released on 1 June 2020:

The panel discusses two of Robert Frost’s best-known nature poems, including “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and their common misreadings, before discussing the unusually urban setting of his “Acquainted with the Night”.

Released on 27 April 2020:

The panel bridges McGonagall’s Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay to a discussion of twentieth-century poet laureate John Betjeman, who had an abiding fascination for railway buildings both architecturally and as a connecting point for human experiences.

Released on 6 April 2020:

In the first podcast of April, the panel examines the work of a truly exceptional poet–the unparalleled and indefatigable William Topaz McGonagall–and discusses three of his poems related to the Tay Bridge (near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green).

Released on 30 March 2020:

After a brief delay, the panel concludes its review of Eliot’s Four Quartets with a discussion of Little Gidding, focusing on its cyclicality, pentecostal imagery, connexions to Dante’s Commedia, and what the poem suggests about the communion of saints.

Released on 2 March 2020:

The panel examines ‘The Dry Salvages’ (rhymes with ‘assuages’), the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and ponders over the speaker’s shift away from temporal considerations and towards intercessory prayer and overtly Christian theological symbolism.

Released on 24 February 2020:

The panel examines ‘East Coker’, the second of Eliot’s Four Quartets, with particular attention to the poet’s developing understanding about the search for meaning in life, the connexion to ancestral history, and the necessity of identifying a telos.

Released on 17 February 2020:

The panel begins a four-week reading of T. S. Eilot’s ‘Four Quartets’, beginning with ‘Burnt Norton’, and with particular attention to the ways in which the poem develops the ideas of the Eternal Present and the human experience of the passage of time.