Love and Death

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Their series will consider the elegies of Milton, Hardy, Bishop, Plath and others at their most intimate and expressive. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Poets discussed in this series include: Milton, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Denise Riley, Anne Bradstreet, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Ben Jonson, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin and more.

Love and Death is a arts podcast hosted by London Review of Books, with 14 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

London Review of Books hosts Love and Death, a arts show with 14 episodes published.

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  Episode #14

  Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah

  Dec 22, 202516 minS0

  <p>Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, a...

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  Episode #13

  Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon

  Nov 24, 202517 minS0

  <p>Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combine...

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  Episode #12

  Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler

  Oct 27, 202514 minS0

  <p>When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Aude...

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  Episode #11

  'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller

  Sep 29, 202515 minS0

  <p>Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an...

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  Episode #10

  ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy

  Aug 31, 202513 minS0

  <p>Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13. </p> <p>Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy ca...

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