Today we continue the question of the character in the poem. Who is the character: a) William Blake, b) Robert Frost, c) William Wordsworth, or d) a Tired Housewife?

Who is speaking in a poem? The author? The narrator? A character? Author as character? We explore some possibilities with two poems by C.T. Coleridge and address 1) characters in poems and 2) the speaker's psychology.

On a whim, Richard and Alex dig into a few wonderful poems by Ted Hughes. Expect war, foxes, the "maternal octopus" slightly more commonly known as the literary theory establishment, the king of a "palace of skulls" and a drowned woman "daubed 'whore'."

Lull yourself to sleep to the soft sound of Hudson the dog's snores as Richard and Alex read poetry in the background. Today, they hope to help us overcome the loneliness of self-isolation by appealing to a few more poets (including Li Bai, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood). Expect emphasis on birds, Autumn and war.

In this rustic first attempt at a podcast episode, Richard and Alex turn to a vast aray of the greatest poets (including Shakespeare, Cowper, Keats, Coleridge, Dickinson, Hardy, Plath and Solie) to make sense of the loneliness of the isolation age. It gets dark...