Podcasts – The Akademician

CR Episode 77: Ben Jonson’s Critical Eye

10 May 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel discusses Ben Jonson's role as critic and author of the Elizabethan age, and reads four of his poems, including several of his Epigrams, before concluding with his rhapsodic ode written in memory of his friend, William Shakespeare.

CR Episode 76: Excerpts from Leaves of Grass

26 April 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel reads excerpts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, including poems from the inscriptions, Song of Myself, Children of Adam, and Calamus, considering the formal nature of the 'American Epic', and Whitman's use of individualism and universalism.

CR Episode 75: Excerpts from Astrophil and Stella

19 April 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel examines a selection of sonnets and a song from Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, considering the formal and tonal connexions between Sidney's poetry and the works of earlier and later poets, including Chaucer, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.

CR Episode 74: Introduction to Abraham Cowley

12 April 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel discusses a selection of poems covering the entire span of Abraham Cowley's oeuvre: beginning with his college years and the unfinished epic 'Davideis', through his popular collections, and concluding with his late 'Ode to the Royal Society'.

CR Episode 73: Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso

5 April 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel discusses a selection of John Milton's shorter poems, the oft-paired 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', and examines their use of Orpheus as a metaphor, and their different attitudes to finding communal delight and solitary pleasure in life.

CR Episode 72: Irony in the Poetry of Stephen Crane

29 March 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel analyses the use of irony in the poetic works of Stephen Crane, including selections from "War Is Kind" (1899), and discusses the development of realism and imagism in English literature, especially in poetry about the experience of war.

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