Political Poems – Details, episodes & analysis

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Political Poems

London Review of Books

Arts

Education

History

Frequency: 1 episode/30d. Total Eps: 12

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford consider poems that have been understood, admired and perhaps criticised for their politics, ranging across several hundred years of literary history.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Political Poems is part of the Close Readings podcast collection from the London Review of Books. Listen to this episode ad free, and get full access to all our Close Readings series, including more from Mark and Seamus:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

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🇨🇦 Canada - books
23/07/2026
#92
🇫🇷 France - books
26/06/2026
#97
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
13/05/2026
#84
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
30/05/2025
#97

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Score global : 69%

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'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones

Episode 8

Wednesday, August 28, 2024 • Duration 57:22

‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.

Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market

This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk

Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation

Subscribe to Close Readings:

In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast to unlock all the episodes;

In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

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'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman

Episode 7

Sunday, July 28, 2024 • Duration 10:35

Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

Read Mark Ford on Whitman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n06/mark-ford/petty-grotesques

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen

Episode 6

Friday, June 28, 2024 • Duration 10:36

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. 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 than an intuitive response to the horror of war.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

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'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Episode 5

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 • Duration 13:12

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

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'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Episode 4

Sunday, April 28, 2024 • Duration 10:56

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 readership to the abolitionist cause. Browning was the direct descendant of slave owners in Jamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and her dramatic monologue presents a searing attack on the hypocrisy of ‘liberty’ as enshrined in the United States constitution. Mark and Seamus look at the origins of the poem and its story, and its place among other abolitionist narratives of the time.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

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'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' by Andrew Marvell

Episode 1

Sunday, January 28, 2024 • Duration 34:52

In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

Read the poem here

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'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

Episode 9

Saturday, September 28, 2024 • Duration 12:55

In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

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'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth

Episode 10

Monday, October 28, 2024 • Duration 11:39

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Political Poems – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

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Political Poems – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other37

Apple1

Youtube2

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other37

Apple1

Youtube2