Poetry
-
The History of Literature #102 – Pablo Neruda
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:36 — 46.0MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) lived an eventful life: from his youth in Chile, to the sensational reception of his book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923), to the career in poetry that led to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (1971), to the political… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #100 – The Greatest Books with Numbers in the Title
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:28 — 41.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More It’s here! Episode 100! Special guest Mike Palindrome, President of the Literature Supporters Club, returns for a numbers-based theme: what are the greatest works of literature with numbers in the title? Authors discussed include Thomas Pynchon, Dr. Seuss, Alexandre Dumas, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Agatha… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #97 – Dad Poetry
It’s Father’s Day weekend here in the U.S., and that means thinking about golf, grilling, and…poetry? On the History of Literature Podcast it does! Professor Bill Hogan of Providence College stops by the show to discuss some classic poems about fathers and fatherhood, “Digging” by Seamus Heaney and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Jacke… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #95 – The Runaway Poets – The Triumphant Love Story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was one of the most prolific and accomplished poets of the Victorian age, an inspiration to Emily Dickensen, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and countless others. And yet, her life was full of cloistered misery, as her father insisted that she should never marry. And then, the clouds lifted, and a letter… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #93 – Robert Frost Finds a Friend
It’s a curious but compelling story: it starts in the years just before World War I, when struggling poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) hastily packed up his family and moved to London in search of a friend. Although Frost’s efforts to ingratiate himself with W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound fizzled, he soon found a man, critic Edward Thomas… Continue reading
-
History of Literature #71 – Did Bob Dylan Deserve the Nobel Prize?
In 1959, a young singer-songwriter named Bob Zimmerman changed his name. As Bob Dylan, he then went on to change the world. After being lauded for more than 50 years for his songs and lyrics, this icon of the Sixties seemingly had achieved everything possible… and then the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize for… Continue reading
-
History of Literature #64 – Dorothy Parker
“She was a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth,” said Alexander Woolcott. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) wrote short stories, poems, reviews, screenplays, and more. Perhaps most famously, she was part of the group of New Yorkers known as the Algonquin Round Table, which met every day for lunch and eventually grew famous for their witticisms, put-downs, and… Continue reading
-
History of Literature Episode #56 – Shelley, HD, Yeats, Frost, Stevens – The Poetry of Ruins (with Professor Bill Hogan)
In 1818, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley published his classic poem “Ozymandias,” depicting the fallen statue of a once-powerful king whose inscription “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” has long since crumbled into the desert. A hundred years later, a set of Modernist poets revisited the subject of ruins, injecting the poetic trope with some surprising… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #51 – Coleridge, Kubla Khan, and the Person from Porlock – A Literary Mystery
In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and fell into a stupor. When he awoke, he had in his head the remnants of a marvelous dream, a vivid train of images of the Chinese emperor Kubla Khan and his summer palace, Xanadu. The vision transformed itself into lines of poetry,… Continue reading
-
The History of Literature #49 – MFA Programs (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)
For decades, the Master of Fine Arts degree has quietly dominated the American literary scene. There are now over 100 programs where professors and students go about the business of turning dreams into fiction through the alchemy – or as some would say, the meatgrinder – known as the writing workshop. It’s a phenomenon like… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 