When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Arnold's 'Thyrsis': https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis
Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats
More in the LRB:
Seamus Perry on Auden: https://lrb.me/ldep11auden
Stefan Collini on Arnold: https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold
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14:16
'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller
Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape.
Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
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‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13.
Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read the poems:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm
Further reading and listening from the LRB:
On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare
Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts
Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly
Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy
Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
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Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Poems discussed in this episode:
William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont
Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell
Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song
Anne Carson, Nox
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson
Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
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War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words.
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/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Poems discussed in this episode:
Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night
Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57
Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’
https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/
W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death
Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war
Further reading in the LRB:
Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters:
https://lrb.me/ldwar1
Jonathan Bate on war poetry:
https://lrb.me/ldwar2
Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB:
https://lrb.me/ldwar3
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Mark Ford and Seamus Perry explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Their series will consider the elegies of Milton, Hardy, Bishop, Plath and others at their most intimate and expressive.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Poets discussed in this series include: Milton, Tennyson, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Denise Riley, Anne Bradstreet, John Berryman, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Ben Jonson, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin and more.
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