Mark Ford and Seamus Perry start their series, The Long and Short, with Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, a weird and disturbing poem about obsession that Tennyson himself was obsessed by. He would recite it in full at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than once, to friends and foes alike – even though it received notoriously bad reviews when it was published. This episode considers why the poem meant so much to him, and what it tells us about the Victorian age.

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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.

Read more on Tennyson in the LRB:

Seamus Perry:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/seamus-perry/are-we-there-yet

Danny Karlin:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n20/danny-karlin/tennyson-s-text