Narrative Poems

‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:01:00 -0000

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. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda.

William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things.

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‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:16:00 -0000

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 and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English.

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‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ by William Shakespeare

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0000

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 that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions before his death (compared to just four for Romeo and Juliet). In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poem displays its author's remarkable originality, from its peculiar reshaping of the Ovidian myth into a tale of comic mismatch, to its surprising diversion into the psychology of grief. They then look at his disturbing follow-up, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), in which a chilling depiction of self-conscious, premeditated evil anticipates characters such as Iago and Macbeth.

‘Hero and Leander’ by Christopher Marlowe

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0000

‘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, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a 6th-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry.

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Introducing ‘Narrative Poems’

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0000

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 ‘Michael’ and Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Join Seamus and Mark as they explore the astonishing richness, adaptability and endurance of one of the oldest forms in Western literature.

Seamus Perry is a professor or English at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is a poet and professor of English at University College London.

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Poems featured in the series:

Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’

Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’

Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’

Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’

Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’

Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

Browning, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’

Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’

Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’

H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’

Seth, ‘The Golden Gate’

Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’