Love and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah.

Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'.

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Find tickets to Seamus's LRB Winter Lecture in London here: https://lrb.me/perrywlpod

Further reading in the LRB:

Freya Johnston on Samuel Johnson:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/freya-johnston/i-m-coming-my-tetsie!

Patricia Beer on Hopkins:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n11/patricia-beer/what-he-meant-by-happiness