Close Readings

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.

In this sample episode from their forthcoming Close Readings series, starting next year, Emily Wilson talks to Thomas Jones about the comedies of Aristophanes, in particular Clouds and Lysistrata.

In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought to be the first autobiography in English.

In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer's sexually voracious professional widow, the Wife of Bath.

In the second episode in their series on medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of the mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first work in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman.

In the first episode of their new podcast miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries, and led a wild and licentious youth before serving penitence in the desert, and going on to teach the value of living an imperfect life.

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.

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.

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 and wives.

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.

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.

In the concluding episode of their acclaimed series, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford confront Robert Lowell.

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney

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.