Love and Death
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.
- Update frequency
- every 26 days
- Average duration
- 12 minutes
- Episodes
- 10
- Years Active
- 2025
‘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 co…
Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
‘In Memoriam’ by Tennyson
Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more
Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop
Milton’s ‘Lycidas’