Episode 112: Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
As we prepare for the new school year, we turn to Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.” We discuss Whitman’s influence, the effects of war, the role of poetry.
Episode 109: Philip Larkin, Aubade
This episode continues our series on the aubade (a morning love song) with a dramatic turn. Larkin reinvents the tradition as waking to the fact that every new day brings a person.
Episode 75: Du Fu, Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station
What is a good life, and how do we make sense of the world when it seems like society is collapsing? In this episode, Lucas Bender joins us once again to discuss.
Episode 63: Rumi, Colorless, Nameless, Free
Poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori joins us to closely read and discuss a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273 CE), one of the greatest of all Sufi poets. We discuss.
Episode 54: Carl Phillips, To Autumn
In this episode, we talk with David Baker about “To Autumn” by Carl Phillips, exploring the way Phillips masterfully achieves a sense of intimacy and restlessness in a lyric ode that tosses.
Episode 42: Robert Hayden, Frederick Douglass
To read Hayden’s poem, click here. Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for granting us permission to read this poem. Reginald Dwayne Betts’s introduction to the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden is.
Episode 14: George Herbert, The Collar
In this episode, we look at “The Collar”–a famous single-stanza poem, playing with meter, rhythm, and rhyme by the seventeenth-century priest and poet, George Herbert. Here is the poem in full: THE.
Episode 7: John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14
This week we look at one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets from the seventeenth century. This famous poem (#14, "Batter my heart") turns a poetic tradition of love and longing to religious.