Critical Readings

Released on 10 February 2020:

The panel concludes its two-week survey of Irish poets, ending with Peter Fallon’s ‘The Old Masters’, Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Address to an Old Wooden Gate’, and Seamus Heaney’s ‘Fosterling’.

Released on 3 February 2020:

The panel begins a two-week survey reading Irish poets, beginning with William Allingham’s ‘The Fairies’, James Joyce’s ‘A Prayer’, and Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before Birth’.

Released on 27 January 2020:

The panel reads two poems by Thomas Hardy on an appropriately hibernal theme, discusses Hardy’s philosophical and literary background, and plans some short story readings for the summer, along with one especially long poem.

Released on 13 January 2020:

The panel considers multiple, potentially competing, readings of three poems from the early, middle, and late work of W. B. Yeats, covering three of his poetic interests: faerie, Irish political events, and a longing for spiritual engagement.

Released on 6 January 2020:

The panel examines three poems by W. H. Auden, including his much-anthologised and potentially ironic ‘Funeral Blues’, the literary biography ‘A Thanksgiving’, and the seasonally-appropriate conclusion to ‘For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio’.

Released on 30 December 2019:

The panel reads and surveys three poems by Longfellow: ‘The Cross of Snow’, ‘The Day Is Done’, and ‘Excelsior’, and makes a case for Longfellow’s narrative and emotive expression, in contrast to modern critical demands for abstraction and complexity.

Released on 16 December 2019:

The panel looks at three poems by Dickinson (nos. 280, 311, and 712) which all centre on a theme of mortality and endings, and discusses their important relevance to modern life, with its focus on perpetual youth and its delusions of immortality.

Released on 2 December 2019:

The panel examines four poems by William Blake from Songs of Innocence (Night, The Chimney Sweeper) and Songs of Experience (The Chimney Sweeper, A Poison Tree), and discusses Blake’s mysticism, child-like wonder, and poetic depictions of Christianity.

Released on 25 November 2019:

The panel examines ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by Keats, focusing on the role of transience, mortality, stasis, truth, beauty, and nature–and imagining whether Keats frames his poems within an ‘epistemology of aesthetics’.

Released on 18 November 2019:

The panel discusses two ‘sleep poems’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Sleepless Dreams” from The House of Life, and the early poem “My Sister’s Sleep”, with special attention, for composition purposes, given to the formal structure of the two poems.