Poetry – The Akademician

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.

CR Episode 70: Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard

15 March 2021 S. P. Cooper

In a return to the works of Alexander Pope, the panel reads his "Eloisa to Abelard" in full and discusses the complexity of Eloisa's tragic circumstances: her love for Abelard, her vocation as a nun, and the suffering to which they have been subjected.

CR Episode 69: Keats and The Eve of St. Agnes

8 March 2021 S. P. Cooper

The panel discusses the late Romantic shift in focus from nominally Christian, deified Nature to transcendental beauty in three longer works by Keats, including "The Eve of St. Agnes" and excerpts from "Endymion" and the unfinished "Hyperion".

1 2 3 … 12 »