Shelley's angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819.
4 months ago

Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, 'O Captain! My Captain!
2 months ago

Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument.
3 months ago

Yeats's great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland's history and in Yeats's...
6 months ago

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female...
5 months ago

'Goblin Market' was the title poem of Christina Rossetti's first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it,...
1 month ago

As podcaster alongside Oxford don, Seamus Perry for the London Review of Books, Ford is a master of both spoken and written criticism.
8 months ago

Readers have thought that Waugh's books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and...
13 months ago

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature's only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
20 months ago

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their Close Readings series with a look at the life and work of WB Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish...
20 months ago