Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The great poem that Keats wrote puts to the test.
He promised to send a copy to his brother and sister-in-law.
In my next packet, I shall send you the pot of basil
that's Isabella, St.
Agnes Eve, and if I should have finished it, which he never does, the Eve of St.
Mark.
You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I have.
Anne Radcliffe was famous for her Gothic novels, and the Eve of St.
Agnes is, in a way, a Gothic poem, a romantic Gothic poem, partly inspired, no doubt, by the enchanting Gothic architecture of Chichester.
And it's full of enchantment,
but it's a brilliantly disenchanted poem too, all about waking up and finding that things aren't quite as they might be.
My name is Seamus Perry.
I'm Master of Balliol College and a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.
And as always, I'm talking with Mark Ford, poet, critic, and Professor of English Literature at University College London.
So, Mark, perhaps we should begin at the very beginning, the marvellous opening verse, the way it establishes one of the
key organizing ideas of the poem which is the contrast between the cold and bleak world outside and the warm and erotic world inside the romantic castle which is the poet's setting but maybe along with that keats is one of your precursors he's a london poet and here he is a london poet writing a kind of romantic poem a kind of a poem of romance and enchantment
but a poem also which is quite worldly and knowing.
How do you feel about the, as it were, the emotional complexity of the poem?
okay let's plunge into it shall i read out the first verse st agnes eve ah bitter chill it was the owl for all his feathers was a-cold the hare limped trembling through the frozen grass and silent was the flock in woolly fold
Numb were the beadsman's fingers while he told his rosary, and while his frosted breath, like pious incense from a censer old, seemed taking flight for heaven without a death, past the sweet virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
Showing 101–120 of 386 · page 6 of 20
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