‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep901

Matthew Reynolds: https://lrb.me/npep902

Donald Davie: https://lrb.me/npep903

According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more on Keats in the LRB:

John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802

Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep702

Jonathan Wordsworth: Wordsworth in Love: https://lrb.me/npep701

Seamus Perry on 'The Prelude': https://lrb.me/npep703

Colin Burrow on Wordsworth: https://lrb.me/npep704

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and what it owes to the Augustan perfectionism of Pope.

They then turn to a much darker example of Romantic narrative poetry, George Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ (published in his collection The Borough in 1810), and explore the bracing realism and psychological insight in the story of a cruel Suffolk fisherman who destroys the apprentices placed in his care.

This episode also features a bonus conversation with Andrew O’Hagan, who reads extracts from 'Tam o’ Shanter' and explains why the poem’s reliably contradictory narrative voice is so useful for anyone learning to write stories.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Karl Miller: Peeping Tam: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep501⁠

Neal Ascherson on Burns's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep502

Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda.

William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Claude Rawson on 'The Rape of the Lock': https://lrb.me/nppope01

Colin Burrow on Pope: https://lrb.me/nppope02

When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Colin Burrow: Loving Milton https://lrb.me/npmilton01

Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides: https://lrb.me/mpmilton02

Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Theology: https://lrb.me/npmilton03

Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. Venus and Adonis appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions before his death (compared to just four for Romeo and Juliet). In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poem displays its author's remarkable originality, from its peculiar reshaping of the Ovidian myth into a tale of comic mismatch, to its surprising diversion into the psychology of grief. They then look at his disturbing follow-up, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), in which a chilling depiction of self-conscious, premeditated evil anticipates characters such as Iago and Macbeth.

Further reading in the LRB:

Stephen Orgel on Shakespeare's poems: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare01

Barbara Everett on the sonnets: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare02

‘Hero and Leander’ was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a 6th-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Further reading in the LRB:

Michael Dobson on the life of Marlowe https://lrb.me/np1marlowe1

Hilary Mantel on the murder of Marlowe: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe2

Charles Nicholl on Faustus: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe3

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford explore one of the oldest forms in Western literature: poems that set out to tell us a story, beginning with Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ and ending with Carson’s 'Autobiography of Red'. Narrative poems can be dizzyingly erotic, like Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis', wittily satirical, like Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’, respond to contemporary political history, like Clough's 'Amours de Voyage', or present heartbreaking tales of loss and remorse, like Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ and Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Join Seamus and Mark as they explore the astonishing richness, adaptability and endurance of one of the oldest forms in Western literature.

Seamus Perry is a professor or English at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is a poet and professor of English at University College London.

To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Poems featured in the series:

Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’

Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’

Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’

Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’

Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’

Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

Browning, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’

Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’

Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’

H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’

Seth, ‘The Golden Gate’

Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’