Critical Readings

The panel reads three poems by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the greatest poet of the Great War, including his "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", and "Spring Offensive", with attention to their arresting imagery and formal characteristics.Continue reading

The panel, joined by special guest Lane Haygood, reads H. P. Lovecraft's Polaris, and discusses its rich symbolism, use of metaphor, deliberately archaic language, ambiguous resolution, and how its formal structure mirrors its narrative content.Continue reading

The panel reads Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and discusses its moral and ethical instruction alongside its waspish skewering of eighteenth-century "dunces", including Colley Cibber, Lord Hervey, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague.Continue reading

The panel reads Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" and discusses its connexion to the real Loxley Hall in Staffordshire, as well as the poem's formal qualities, and its depiction of nineteenth-century British social, imperial, and military culture.Continue reading

The panel closely reads four poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, focusing primarily on her sonnets, and evaluates their formal structure and potential metaphysical and theological implications, whilst connecting each poem to the others in turn.Continue reading

The panel reads the entirety of Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius" from his collection Lays of Ancient Rome, and discusses the Horatian nature of the work as a narrative which both edifies and delights, along with the formal aspects of the poem.Continue reading

The panel reviews selections from James Joyce's inaugural work, the poetry collection titled Chamber Music, the first-published of his substantial works, giving attention to the formal metrics, structure, and interrelated symbolism of the poems.Continue reading

The panel reads four poems by Lewis Carroll and discusses the importance of poetic form in nonsense poetry, along with several potentially complicated readings that go beyond straight-forward narrative and verge upon social commentary.Continue reading

The panel reads "The Quest of the Sangraal" by the nineteenth-century parson and poet, Robert Stephen Hawker, with special attention to the use of differing Arthurian traditions and the fusion of mediæval and modern poetic forms, syntax, and vocabulary.Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by Thomas Traherne, a late seventeenth-century English poet of imaginative, reflective, and speculative verse, whose manuscripts were discovered by happenstance and saved from the refuse pit in the late nineteenth century.Continue reading