Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Thomas Hardy, with its blend of bitterness of tenderness, its intense dramatisations of loss and grief, and its inversion of traditional tropes of love poetry to anticipate the attitudes of later 20th century writers.
Mark and Seamus look at the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, the east-coast American poet who enjoyed a limited audience, and published relatively little, in her lifetime, but whose reputation has grown enormously since her death.
Mark and Seamus discuss life and work of W. H. Auden, from the influence of his parents and his political development, to how his poetry emerged from a meeting of English tradition with high modernism, and its formal response to the fractured nature of his times.
In their first episode together, recorded in 2017, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry looked at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet much written about in the archive of the London Review of Books.