Critical Readings

CR Episode 170: Seamus Heaney’s Passion for the Past

10 April 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads and discusses the connexions between three poems by Seamus Heaney: “Blackberry Picking”, “Three-Piece”, and “Mycenae Nightwatch”, with attention to their formal aspects, and their use of highly emotive imagery and references to the past.

CR Episode 169: The Poetry of Edgar Guest

3 April 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reviews the work of “The People’s Poet”, Edgar A. Guest, national best-seller, sole Poet Laureate of Michigan, host of the A Guest in Your House radio programme, and author of innumerable verses filled with indefatigable, homespun optimism.

CR Episode 168: The Poetry of Rupert Brooke

27 March 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads three poems by Rupert Brooke, a poet of the Georgian movement of the early twentieth century, whose poetry of the early Great War period suggests sentiments and ideals which were about to be transformed by modernised warfare.

CR Episode 167: The Poetry of Wilfred Owen

20 March 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads three poems by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the greatest poet of the Great War, including his “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and “Spring Offensive”, with attention to their arresting imagery and formal characteristics.

CR Episode 166: H. P. Lovecraft’s Polaris

13 March 2023 Critical Readings

The panel, joined by special guest Lane Haygood, reads H. P. Lovecraft’s Polaris, and discusses its rich symbolism, use of metaphor, deliberately archaic language, ambiguous resolution, and how its formal structure mirrors its narrative content.

CR Episode 165: Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

6 March 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” and discusses its moral and ethical instruction alongside its waspish skewering of eighteenth-century “dunces”, including Colley Cibber, Lord Hervey, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague.

CR Episode 164: Tennyson’s Locksley Hall

27 February 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” and discusses its connexion to the real Loxley Hall in Staffordshire, as well as the poem’s formal qualities, and its depiction of nineteenth-century British social, imperial, and military culture.

CR Episode 163: Love and Death with Edna St. Vincent Millay

20 February 2023 Critical Readings

The panel closely reads four poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, focusing primarily on her sonnets, and evaluates their formal structure and potential metaphysical and theological implications, whilst connecting each poem to the others in turn.

CR Episode 162: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Horatius

13 February 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads the entirety of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Horatius” from his collection Lays of Ancient Rome, and discusses the Horatian nature of the work as a narrative which both edifies and delights, along with the formal aspects of the poem.

CR Episode 161: James Joyce’s Chamber Music

6 February 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reviews selections from James Joyce’s inaugural work, the poetry collection titled Chamber Music, the first-published of his substantial works, giving attention to the formal metrics, structure, and interrelated symbolism of the poems.

CR Episode 160: The Poetry of Lewis Carroll

30 January 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads four poems by Lewis Carroll and discusses the importance of poetic form in nonsense poetry, along with several potentially complicated readings that go beyond straight-forward narrative and verge upon social commentary.

CR Episode 159: The Sangraal of Robert Stephen Hawker

23 January 2023 Critical Readings

The panel reads “The Quest of the Sangraal” by the nineteenth-century parson and poet, Robert Stephen Hawker, with special attention to the use of differing Arthurian traditions and the fusion of mediæval and modern poetic forms, syntax, and vocabulary.