Critical Readings examines key literary texts using close reading and critical analysis, and explains these approaches in discussion. Listeners will learn about...
The panel reads Tennyson's Ulysses with special attention given to how the return to Ithaca changed Ulysses; how he may be compared to and contrasted with his son, Telemachus; and what the nature of his heroism is—narrow, selfish, noble, or courageous.Continue reading
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53:45
CR Episode 256: Tennyson’s Tithonus
The panel reads Tennyson's "Tithonus," a dramatic monologue written in 1833, and considers both what the poem suggests about the importance of mortality to the human condition, and its significance in the context of the death of Arthur Hallam.Continue reading
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50:05
CR Episode 255: Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe
The panel reads "The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe" by the Tudor poet John Skelton, a poetic champion of Chaucer, and the inventor of Skeltonic verse, a roughly syllabic and strongly rhymed form of English poetry much beloved of the Henrician court.Continue reading
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1:05:01
CR Episode 254: The Poetry of A.E. Housman
The panel reads three poems by A.E. Housman, the renowned British classicist and poet, and discusses the presence of death in his poetry, the influences of Romanticism, the importance of the speaker's role, and the poetic ironies of his biography.Continue reading
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1:09:12
CR Episode 253: Pope’s Messiah
The panel reads Alexander Pope's "Messiah," based upon Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the biblical Book of Isaiah, with a discussion of its formal qualities, its Late Augustan/pre-Romantic historical context, and its fusion of Classical and Hebraic imagery.Continue reading
Critical Readings examines key literary texts using close reading and critical analysis, and explains these approaches in discussion. Listeners will learn about the texts themselves and about how to approach a text for critical analysis.
Ireland