Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! After taking a look at Emily Dickinson's Poem #1 94 ("Title divine - is mine!"), Jacke talks to Cambridge University's Jess Cotton, whose biography of John Ashbery (John Ashbery: A Critical Life) charts Ashbery's rise from a minor avant-garde figure to the most important poet of his generation. PLUS contemporary poet David van den Ber ... Show More
Yesterday
801 Persuasion by Jane Austen (Revisited)
As the History of Literature Podcast Tour rolls through literary England, Jacke and Emma are revisiting some past episodes with connections to what they're seeing and doing. Today, they're in Bath, which naturally means spending some time with Jane Austen. In this episode, which ... Show More
33m 56s
Oct 2024
John Milton: life of the week
Across the 65 years of his life, writer John Milton packed a lot in: poet, polemicist, political operator – engaging with ideas that often challenged the status quo. In today's Life of the Week episode, Professor Islam Issa speaks to Matt Elton about the life and legacy of this 1 ... Show More
37m 43s
Jul 2025
Siobhan Phillips on Marianne Moore ("Armor's Undermining Modesty")
"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips, about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty." Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of ... Show More
1h 47m
Feb 2025
Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire. Partie III.
Apollinaire is a pivotal figure in the history of French poetry. Friend of Picasso, albeit a sometimes volatile one, inventor of the term 'surrealism' and the poem without punctuation, he advocated a poetry that was direct and intuitive, free of any refined intellectualis ... Show More
46m 57s