– Thoughtful Analysis of Essential Literature
In the second Idylls of the King episode, the panel reads “Gareth and Lynette”, with special attention to Gareth’s demonstration of chivalry through action, the text’s presentation of nobilty as essential to knightliness, and Bellicent’s characterisation.
The panel begins a twelve-week series covering the entirety of Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle, Idylls of the King, beginning with the cycle’s publishing history and formal characteristics, and readings of the dedication and “The Coming of Arthur”.
The Waste Land series concludes with readings and analysis of the final two parts–“Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”–with special attention to the biblical and grail quest imagery, the Wheel of Fortune, and contrasting aquatic extremes.
In this third part of the four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, the panel reads “The Fire Sermon” and discusses cities both real and unreal, and how the abnegation of all human desire leads to the hollowing out of the psyche.
The panel continues with the second of a four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, reading “A Game of Chess”, with special attention given to the idea of death and rebirth, and to the presence and significance of baptismal imagery.
The panel embarks upon a four-week study of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, beginning with a discussion of the allusive connexions and the imagistic and modernist effects of the poem’s opening epigram and its first section, “The Burial of the Dead”.
The panel reads a selection of the poety of the seventeenth-century, Welsh, metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan, with a particular attention to Vaughan’s own religious beliefs, philosophical positions, and connexions to Ben Jonson and George Herbert.
The panel reads a selection of verses from Owen Meredith–Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Earl of Lytton–an eminent Victorian statesman and poet, including an excerpt from the second part of his long, anapestic epic, “Lucile”, and two shorter poems.
The panel reads the poetry of Robert Graves, from his early war poetry to the work of his later life, with special attention to his theory of The White Goddess, including “A Dead Boche”, “A Boy in Church”, “The God Called Poetry” and “The Spoilsport”.
The panel reads four poems by D. H. Lawrence: “Whales Weep Not!”, “Moonrise”, “When I Read Shakespeare”, and “Only Man”, and discusses their frank but sensual depictions of sexuality, communication, communion, nature, salvation, and damnation.
The panel reads two Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ in conversation with one another–looking at the similarities of their conclusions and the difference in their approaches–as they address the roles of Man, Nature, and God.
The panel reads a selection of three poems by Conrad Aiken–“The Room”, “Exile”, and “Goya”–and discusses their dreamlike imagery, and the impact of personal tragedy, English Romanticism, and Freudian and Jungian theories, upon Aiken’s poetry.