Poetry
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The History of Literature #262 Ovid
Ovid (43 BCE – 17 or 18 AD) was one of the most successful poets in the Roman Empire–until he was banished from Rome by Augustus himself. What led to his exile? What had he written, and how might it have offended the emperor? In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the author of The… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #257 Shakespeare’s Best | Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)
Continuing the “Shakespeare on Thursdays” theme for August, Jacke takes a look at Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”), another one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and well known sonnets. What does the poem say about love? How does it fit into the world of weddings? And what does it have… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #256 – T.S. Eliot | The Waste Land
In 1922, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), an American living in England, published The Waste Land, widely viewed as perhaps the greatest and most iconic poem of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf recognized its power immediately, praising it for its “great beauty and force of phrase: symmetry and tensity.” And yet, as nearly a hundred years’ worth… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #204 – Living Poetry (with Bob Holman
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL2859676941.mp3 Fellow poet Naomi Shihab Nye says that Bob Holman’s “life gusto and poetry voice keep the world turning.” In this episode of The History of Literature, we tap into that voice, as Bob Holman joins us for a rollicking conversation about the poetic life he’s led, from his birth in a small town in… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #198 – Sylvia Plath
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL5250857199.mp3 Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston in 1932, the daughter of a German-born professor, Otto Plath, and his student, Aurelia Schober. After her father died in 1940, Plath’s family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where her mother taught secretarial studies at Boston University and Plath embarked on a path that she would follow the… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #176 – William Carlos Williams (“The Use of Force”)
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL2977229302.mp3 Today, the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is famous among poetry fans for his vivid, economical poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say.” But for most of his lifetime, he struggled to achieve success comparable to those of his contemporaries Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Toiling away as… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #156 – The Sonnet
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL3663385565.mp3 “A sonnet,” said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “is a moment’s monument.” But who invented the sonnet? Who brought it to prominence? How has it changed over the years? And why does this form continue to be so compelling? In this episode of the History of Literature, we take a brief look at one… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #154 – John Milton
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL4902521222.mp3 John Milton (1608 – 1674) was a revolutionary, a republican, an iconoclast, a reformer, and a brilliant polemicist, who fearlessly took on both church and king. And he ranks among the greatest poets of all time, a peer of Shakespeare and Homer. Philip Pullman, the author who named his trilogy (His Dark Materials) after… Continue reading
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History of Literature Episode #138 – Why Poetry (with Matthew Zapruder)
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL9865955051.mp3 In his new book Why Poetry, the poet Matthew Zapruder has issued “an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for its accessibility to all readers.” The poet Robert Hass says, “Zapruder on poetry is pure pleasure. His prose is so direct that you have the impression, sentence by sentence,… Continue reading
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History of Literature #121 – A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man – John Ashbery’s Early Life (with Karin Roffman)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:41 — 45.4MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | More In this episode, author Karin Roffman joins Jacke for a conversation about her literary biography of John Ashbery, one of America’s greatest twentieth-century poets. In naming Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life as one of its Notable Books of the Year, The New York Times noted… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 