Seamus Perry is a professor of English at Oxford. He presents the LRB podcast series Close Readings, with Mark Ford.
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...
You would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill...
For the third episode in her short series on Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill is joined by Seamus Perry to experience the stone circle through the mind and eyes of a Romantic, with the likes of Wordsworth, Blake,...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of two poets, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic poetry,...
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 second Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets.
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 this episode, 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 and wives.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods, in the latest episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets.
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.
Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry.
Mark Ford talks about his latest book Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner with Seamus Perry.
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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