melvin: Using poetry is the means where you can work what the hell's going on. coleridge had bordered a book from wordsworth, i think, called anderson's. He really goes for the smoothly sentimental, uh, done bannet numbers he is. terence mccormick wrote a collection called american sonat for my assassin,. poims written on the occasion of the election of donald trump. The in cask gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material. What was not said that you would like to kick off? Who wants to kick off?"
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the collection of poems published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “never before imprinted”. Yet, while some of Shakespeare's other poems and many of his plays were often reprinted in his lifetime, the Sonnets were not a publishing success. They had to make their own way, outside the main canon of Shakespeare’s work: wonderful, troubling, patchy, inspiring and baffling, and they have appealed in different ways to different times. Most are addressed to a man, something often overlooked and occasionally concealed; one early and notorious edition even changed some of the pronouns.
With:
Hannah Crawforth
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London
Don Paterson
Poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews
And
Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson