Show Notes
In their fifth episode, Mark and Seamus reach their first 20th century poet of the series, the Ohio-born, New York-loving ad man Hart Crane, and his epic 1930 work The Bridge. Directly inspired by The Waste Land, The Bridge sought to address modernity, as Eliot had done, with all its conflicts, contradictions and difficulties, but infuse it with a Whitman-esque expression of American greatness.
Mark and Seamus discuss Crane’s multi-faceted mythologisation of the bridge, the baroque complexity of his language, the deployment of Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins in service of his questing American origin story, and the personal struggles of a man who, for his brief life, found himself in the exhilarating creative centre of modernist experimentation.
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Adam Philips: Roaring Boy
Michael Hofmann: Three Poems
Mark Ford: Two Poems
More from The Long and Short
In the final episode of the Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story.
The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald. The dazzlingly polyphonic Dart (2002) celebrates the voices of the river Dart, and the people, animals and supernatural forces entwined with it. Memorial (2011) translates and transfigures the Iliad, stripping back the narrative to reveal the epic’s ‘bright unbearable reality’. Mark and Seamus explore the thematic throughlines in Oswald’s work, unpicking allusions and influences at play in these poems.
In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s Passing is a taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, that feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sensibility and the freedoms of bebop to capture the multiplicity of Harlem voices.
Originally conceived as a film script, Gaudete is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, Gaudete shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, Gaudete is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant.
James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life. In Dubliners, the reader experiences already the vastness of Joyce’s literary imagination, his harsh criticism of the Catholic Church, his shameless plundering of the lives of his contemporaries, and a writer’s self-conscious vocation to ‘forge the uncreated conscience of his race’.