Critical Readings

Released on 10 March 2025:

The panel reads parts three and four with attention given to the moral, logical, and legal conundrums that perplex Doctor Wortle, and with a consideration of how Mrs. Wortle, Mr. Puddicombe, and Mrs. Stantiloupe represent differing aspects of society.

Released on 3 March 2025:

The panel reads the first two parts (or six chapters) of Trollope’s fortieth novel, beginning with an introduction to the author and the text, followed by an examination of the titular character and the mystery surrounding Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke.

Released on 24 February 2025:

The panel discusses four poems by Yeats, including his most famous—”The Second Coming”—as a way of examining his understanding of a cyclical cosmology, whilst also looking at his depiction of cataclysmic events that influence or constrain free will.

Released on 17 February 2025:

The panel reads John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and considers the poems within the context of the author’s biography and Judeo-Christian theology, with special emphasis on the distinction between God as abstraction and as embodied being.

Released on 10 February 2025:

The panel reads Tennyson’s Tiresias and considers its story of the blind prophet’s extended (but not eternal) life in the context of what it reveals about the poet’s struggle with human mortality, and about the role of prophecy and its reception.

Released on 3 February 2025:

The panel reads Tennyson’s Ulysses with special attention given to how the return to Ithaca changed Ulysses; how he may be compared to and contrasted with his son, Telemachus; and what the nature of his heroism is—narrow, selfish, noble, or courageous.

Released on 27 January 2025:

The panel reads Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” a dramatic monologue written in 1833, and considers both what the poem suggests about the importance of mortality to the human condition, and its significance in the context of the death of Arthur Hallam.

Released on 20 January 2025:

The panel reads “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe” by the Tudor poet John Skelton, a poetic champion of Chaucer, and the inventor of Skeltonic verse, a roughly syllabic and strongly rhymed form of English poetry much beloved of the Henrician court.

Released on 13 January 2025:

The panel reads three poems by A.E. Housman, the renowned British classicist and poet, and discusses the presence of death in his poetry, the influences of Romanticism, the importance of the speaker’s role, and the poetic ironies of his biography.

Released on 6 January 2024:

The panel reads Alexander Pope’s “Messiah,” based upon Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and the biblical Book of Isaiah, with a discussion of its formal qualities, its Late Augustan/pre-Romantic historical context, and its fusion of Classical and Hebraic imagery.