Political Poems

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds a model in Little Gidding, a small village that for a time in the 17th century served as an Anglican commune before its closure under Puritan scrutiny. Mark and Seamus explore how Eliot’s poetics heighten our sense of the liminal and mystical, and how, by ‘scrambling our brains’, Eliot’s brilliant rhetoric subsumes his bizarre politics.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Frank Kermode: Disintegration
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n02/frank-kermode/disintegration
Helen Thaventhiran: Things Ill Done and Undone
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/helen-thaventhiran/things-ill-done-and-undone
Tobias Gregory: By All Possible Art
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n24/tobias-gregory/by-all-possible-art
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As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’.
A dreamlike reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Station Island’ describes Heaney’s encounters with the ghosts of childhood acquaintances, literary heroes and victims of the Troubles. Seamus and Mark explore Heaney’s unusually autobiographical poem, which wrestles with the inescapability of politics.
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 
Further reading in the LRB:
Paul Muldoon: Sweaney Peregraine
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n20/paul-muldoon/sweaney-peregraine
Seamus Perry: We Did and We Didn’t
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t
John Kerrigan: Hand and Foot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/john-kerrigan/hand-and-foot
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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
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes
E.P. Thompson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis
Colin Burrow:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground
Thomas Keymer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation
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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
Read more in the LRB:
Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hill
Ian Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up
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‘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
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Read more in the LRB:
Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid
Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced
John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness
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