Mark and Seamus’s starting point for The Long and Short, their new series of Close Readings podcasts, is 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.
This is an extract from the first episode. To listen to the full series, and our other Close Readings series, sign up to our Close Readings subscription: https://lrb.me/closereadings
