Seamus Perry is a professor of English at Oxford. He presents the LRB podcast series Close Readings, with Mark Ford.
Thomas Mann’s most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him. True, he made a...
D.H. Lawrence is a ‘teller’ in the sense of telling you what to do – and, more particularly, what not to do: as Aldous Huxley observed, he could be ‘bloodthirstily censorious’. Lawrence had a philosophy, or as he self-deprecatingly put it, a ‘pseudo-philosophy’, coupled with a strong urge to dish out spiritual advice. ‘I want folk – English folk – to alter, and have more sense,’ as he said in a letter
When the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he told
a story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening. ‘Tell us this,’ he said, ‘are...
This book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject...
Stephen Spender had spent two terms as an undistinguished student at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of W.B. Yeats in the latest episode in their ongoing Close Readings series.
Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O‘Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson, her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
In the latest episode of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, the great poetic interrogator of the American family home as a site of trauma for daughters...
In the latest episode in their series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.
In the first episode in a new series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney
In the concluding episode of their acclaimed series, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford confront Robert Lowell.
Mark Ford, Seamus Perry and Joanna Biggs consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of A.E. Housman.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poetry of Thomas Hardy in the latest in their series of discussions on 20th century poets.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, through the lens of the LRB archive.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of W. H. Auden with reference to pieces from the LRB.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Philip Larkin, drawing on articles from our archive by contributors including Alan Bennett, Barbara Everett and John Bayley.
Mark Ford talks about his latest book Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner with Seamus Perry.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, and the pieces about him in the LRB archive.
Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the...
An informal Times feature on literary classics, published recently, included a list drawn up by a director of Penguin Classics: ‘The 50 Greatest Classics (pre-1900).’ Such lists can...
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