The panel concludes with an examination of Lucrece’s central role as a Shakespearean protagonist, addressing her attitude towards the conflict between Roman shame and the natural law, and how her speech is situated across historical contexts.
Tag: Poetry
CR Episode 173: Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Part II
The panel reads the second third of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, with particular attention to the paradoxical presentation of light and darkness, and to the dual nature of guilt and shame in the poem, as situated within a putatively historical Roman context.
CR Episode 172: Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Part I
In the first of a three-part series on Shakespeare’s Lucrece, the panel explores the Roman history and sources for the poem, before reading and examining its metaphors with a focus on Sextus Tarquinius’ internal debate and final, abhorrent resolution.
CR Episode 171: The Poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh
The panel reads three poems by the courtier, soldier, privateer, and poet, Sir Walter Raleigh, examining their formal (and informal) qualities, and discussing their connexions to other poetic endeavours and movements, and to contemporary events.
CR Episode 170: Seamus Heaney’s Passion for the Past
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
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
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
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 165: Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
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
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
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
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.