Critical Readings

The panel continues with the second of a four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, reading "A Game of Chess", with special attention given to the idea of death and rebirth, and to the presence and significance of baptismal imagery.Continue reading

The panel embarks upon a four-week study of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, beginning with a discussion of the allusive connexions and the imagistic and modernist effects of the poem's opening epigram and its first section, "The Burial of the Dead".Continue reading

The panel reads a selection of the poety of the seventeenth-century, Welsh, metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan, with a particular attention to Vaughan's own religious beliefs, philosophical positions, and connexions to Ben Jonson and George Herbert.Continue reading

The panel reads a selection of verses from Owen Meredith--Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Earl of Lytton--an eminent Victorian statesman and poet, including an excerpt from the second part of his long, anapestic epic, "Lucile", and two shorter poems.Continue reading

The panel reads the poetry of Robert Graves, from his early war poetry to the work of his later life, with special attention to his theory of The White Goddess, including "A Dead Boche", "A Boy in Church", "The God Called Poetry" and "The Spoilsport".Continue reading

The panel reads four poems by D. H. Lawrence: "Whales Weep Not!", "Moonrise", "When I Read Shakespeare", and "Only Man", and discusses their frank but sensual depictions of sexuality, communication, communion, nature, salvation, and damnation.Continue reading

The panel reads two Pope's 'An Essay on Man' and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' in conversation with one another--looking at the similarities of their conclusions and the difference in their approaches--as they address the roles of Man, Nature, and God.Continue reading

The panel reads a selection of three poems by Conrad Aiken--"The Room", "Exile", and "Goya"--and discusses their dreamlike imagery, and the impact of personal tragedy, English Romanticism, and Freudian and Jungian theories, upon Aiken's poetry.Continue reading

Following on the theme of love and death, the panel reads Milton's pastoral elegy, "Lycidas", dedicated to the memory of Edward King, with special attention to Milton's theology and his critique of both the contemporary English clergy and community.Continue reading

For St. Valentine's Day, the panel reads what is likely to have been Shakespeare's first officially published work: his genre-defying Tragi-Comi-Ovidian poem "Venus and Adonis", dedicated to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton.Continue reading