Book In

In the early 20th century, as the nation of Ireland emerged from the turmoil of centuries of struggle, oppression, poverty and famine, one figure above all others was  both prophet and judge of the tumultuous process. In his early years, William Butler Yeats created a mythology of Ireland, and later, with poems like Easter 1916 and The Second Coming, he wrote of the ambiguity, the "terrible beauty", that was explicit in the uprisings and civil wars which preceded the creation of the Irish Free State. But he was not just a poet; with Maud Gonne, the actress and revolutionary with whom he fell hopelessly in love and who he compared to Helen of Troy, he became involved in the creation of an Irish Theatre, and in direct political action with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the IRA. On its creation, he became a public figure as a Senator in the Dail, and with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 became world famous. But he was a man of contradictions, a Republican who detested violence, a Protestant who supported Irish freedom, an intellectual who believed in magic. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at W B Yeats in a 2 part series.

W H Auden wrote some of the most beautiful and complex poetry of the 20th century. Best known to modern audiences as the author of “Stop all the Clocks”, read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he grew up in Yorkshire and the Midlands, and his parents were a psychiatrist and a nurse; this provincial, professional background pervades his poetry with its images of industry and science. Like many of his generation, he was on the left and went to Spain to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But when World War Two started, he left for America, from where he observed the carnage with a combination of detachment and guilt. Like his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and T.S Eliot, he converted to Christianity as an adult, and his later work is an extraordinary fusion of private love, public engagement and religious exploration. There are many recordings of him on TV chat shows in his later years, and his extraordinary,Rembrandtesque appearance and gravelly voice convey a public intellectual of a kind which no longer exists in the modern world. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore the poetry of this brilliant and underestimated poet.

In the second episode on T.S.Eliot, Book In looks at the poems he wrote after The Wasteland, as he moved towards a conversion to Christianity. In the Hollow Men, he returns again to the desolation and spiritual emptiness of the West after the First World War, weaving together Dante, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Gunpowder Plot amongst other themes. By the time he wrote Ash Wednesday three years later he had fully embraced the High Anglican church, and the poem tells of his need to renounce the pride and arrogance which he felt had characterised his behaviour in the past. The language in these poems is incantatory, chanting, rooted in the bible and the prayerbook. Marina is a beautiful meditation on sin, death and redemption, immersed in images of the sea and the coastal New England landscape of his youth. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore this critical phase of Eliot’s life, and the exquisite religious verse he produced, perhaps the finest in the English language sine the metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

The first poem that T.S.Eliot published, in 1915, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and two years later, it was included as the title poem in a collection called Prufrock and Other Observations. It was a sensation; breaking dramatically with the gentle and conventional lyrics of the late Victorian and Edwardian poets of the time, many critics found it pretentious at best and incomprehensible at worst. One speculated that Eliot had thought "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." But Prufrock and the other poems in the collection marked a revolutionary break in literature, and heralded the arrival of modernism, with its representation of the fracturing of western society and the western mind in the wake of the First World War and the work of Freud and Jung as they explained the workings of human consciousness. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss these brilliant and groundbreaking poems, and how they are both an extraordinary break with the past, but also deeply rooted in western culture from Greek and Roman times onwards.

At the age of 55, and at the height of his fame, Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels and decided to devote the rest of his life to poetry. He was disillusioned with the commercial requirements of novel writing, and had been upset by the adverse reaction of some critics to Jude the Obscure. Many people believe that his poems are his greatest achievement, and he is in exalted company in being in the first rank of both poetry and novels or plays, along with Samuel Beckett, DH Lawrence and Shakespeare. Much of his poetry was inspired by his first wife Emma; the beautiful lyric When I Set Out for Lyonnesse was written after he first met her. Their marriage was unhappy, but when she died, Hardy was consumed with grief, and remorse at how badly he had treated her. The poems he wrote at this time are among the most beautiful in the English language. Join Rupert and Charlie as they take a look at some of Hardy’s poems.