The panel reviews the second half of Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with particular attention shown to the allegorical representation of the seven deadly sins and the means by which they can be overcome through the virtue of temperance.
Tag: Poetry
CR Episode 42: The Faerie Queene, Book II, Cantos 1-6
The panel reviews selections from the first six cantos of Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with particular attention to Guyon’s interactions with Belphoebe (and her connexion to Diana and Venus), the character of Palmer, and the return of Archimago.
CR Episode 41: The Faerie Queene, Book I, Cantos 7-12
The panel examines the second half of the first book of The Faerie Queene, with particular attention to the foundations of textual analysis, demonstrating readings grounded in the texts themselves and in the material and tropes available to the author.
CR Episode 40: The Faerie Queene, Book I, Cantos 1-6
The panel welcomes two additional experts to begin a several-month-long survey of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in its entirety, in this episode examining Spenser’s personal history, his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, and the first half of Book I.
CR Episode 39: Robert Frost and the Road Not Taken
The panel discusses two of Robert Frost’s best-known nature poems, including “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and their common misreadings, before discussing the unusually urban setting of his “Acquainted with the Night”.
CR Episode 38: Betjeman’s Railways
The panel bridges McGonagall’s Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay to a discussion of twentieth-century poet laureate John Betjeman, who had an abiding fascination for railway buildings both architecturally and as a connecting point for human experiences.
CR Episode 37: William McGonagall and the Tay Bridge
In the first podcast of April, the panel examines the work of a truly exceptional poet–the unparalleled and indefatigable William Topaz McGonagall–and discusses three of his poems related to the Tay Bridge (near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green).
CR Episode 36: Eliot’s Four Quartets IV – Little Gidding
After a brief delay, the panel concludes its review of Eliot’s Four Quartets with a discussion of Little Gidding, focusing on its cyclicality, pentecostal imagery, connexions to Dante’s Commedia, and what the poem suggests about the communion of saints.
CR Episode 35: Eliot’s Four Quartets III – The Dry Salvages
The panel examines ‘The Dry Salvages’ (rhymes with ‘assuages’), the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and ponders over the speaker’s shift away from temporal considerations and towards intercessory prayer and overtly Christian theological symbolism.
CR Episode 34: Eliot’s Four Quartets II – East Coker
The panel examines ‘East Coker’, the second of Eliot’s Four Quartets, with particular attention to the poet’s developing understanding about the search for meaning in life, the connexion to ancestral history, and the necessity of identifying a telos.
CR Episode 33: Eliot’s Four Quartets I – Burnt Norton
The panel begins a four-week reading of T. S. Eilot’s ‘Four Quartets’, beginning with ‘Burnt Norton’, and with particular attention to the ways in which the poem develops the ideas of the Eternal Present and the human experience of the passage of time.
CR Episode 32: Irish Poets II – Fallon, Kavanagh, Heaney
The panel concludes its two-week survey of Irish poets, ending with Peter Fallon’s ‘The Old Masters’, Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Address to an Old Wooden Gate’, and Seamus Heaney’s ‘Fosterling’.