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Oct 28, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Seamus Perry |mark ford
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.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford |Matthew Bevis
‘Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898).
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford
In July 1917, shortly after his arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Wilfred Owen drafted the first of the five poems published during his lifetime. ‘Sing me at dawn,’ it exclaims, but only with your laugh:Like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf;Like Love, that cannot flute for smiling at Life.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford
‘First/Bunnydied, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects during a post-prandial stroll around midtown Manhattan in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche, but only insiders to the avant-garde coteries in which O’Hara moved would have known who Bunny was – especially since she published under the name V.R. Lang.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Seamus Perry |mark ford
Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and interrogates his own attitude to nationalist violence.
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Feb 14, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford
A version of ‘Solo de lune’ by Jules LaforgueI smoke, spread outBeneath the evening sky on the top deckOf a careering stagecoach, every boneIn my body rattling, jangling – but my soulIs a dancing Ariel, my soulWhirls beyond bitterness and cloyingHoney, beyond the passingRoads and hills and valleys and evenMy own tobacco fumes … and dancing it recallsThat we fell crazily in love … and yet we partedWithout mentioningThe fact: spleen drove me away, spleen, all-Invading spleen.
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Dec 1, 2023 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Jules Laforgue |mark ford |Janani Ambikapathy
The 19th-century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue may not be well-known in the Anglosphere, but some of the poems featured in Lunar Solo, translated by Mark Ford, will likely be familiar to readers of T.S. Eliot:
I smoke, spread out
Beneath the evening sky on the top-deck
Of a careering stagecoach, every bone
In my body rattling, jangling — but my soul
Is a dancing Ariel, my soul
Beyond such resemblances, a delightful strangeness trails these poems in Ford’s translation.
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Nov 8, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford
‘Too many dreams have been deferred for too long,’ Joe Biden announced in his acceptance speech of 7 November 2020. It isn’t unusual for American politicians to talk about dreams in their speeches, but they don’t often quote from Langston Hughes, famous for his communist sympathies and irreverent poems (‘Listen Christ,/You did alright in your day, I reckon –/But that day’s gone now’).
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Sep 24, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford
Ted Hughes was among the earliest contributors to the London Review of Books; his poem ‘Night Arrival of Sea-Trout’ appeared in the very first issue of 25 October 1979. Hughes and the paper’s founding editor, Karl Miller, had known each other while undergraduates at Cambridge.
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Aug 24, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | mark ford |Seamus Perry
James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life.
