Shows / Narrative Poems
Narrative Poems
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford explore one of the oldest forms in Western literature: poems that set out to tell us a story, beginning with Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ and ending with Carson’s 'Autobiography of Red'. Narrative poems can be dizzyingly erotic, like Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis', wittily satirical, like Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’, respond to contemporary political history, like Clough's 'Amours de Voyage', or present heartbreaking tales of loss and remorse, like Wordsworth’s…
Episodes
- Narrative Poems
‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age…
Narrative Poems‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican…
- Narrative Poems
‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It…
- Narrative Poems
‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats
According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When…
- Narrative Poems
‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later…
- Narrative Poems
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the…
Narrative Poems‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope
Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty…
- Narrative Poems
‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton
When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres…
- Narrative Poems
‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ by William Shakespeare
Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. Venus and Adonis appeared in quarto…
- Narrative Poems
‘Hero and Leander’ by Christopher Marlowe
‘Hero and Leander’ was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead…
- Narrative Poems
Introducing ‘Narrative Poems’
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford explore one of the oldest forms in Western literature: poems that set out to tell us a story, beginning with Marlowe’s ‘Hero and…