Mark and Seamus will discuss a large number of poems in this series, many of which can be found in the Penguin Book of Elegy edited by Andrew Motion Stephen Regan.
Here is a guide to the poems they're planning to discuss. Some will be discussed in a single episode, some grouped together by theme.
- Milton - Lycidas; Methought I saw my late espoused saint
- Elegies for Children - Ben Jonson, Epitaphs; Anne Bradstreet, In Memory of My Dear Grandchild; Geoffrey Hill, September Song; Elizabeth Bishop, First Death in Nova Scotia;
- Elegies for Poets (I) Spenser’s Astrophel; Arnold’s Thyrsis; Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats;
- Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
- Self-Elegies (I) Chidiock Tichborne / Walter Raleigh self-elegies, Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, Sylvia Plath’s Edge, Hardy’s Afterwards,
- Family Elegies: Henry King’s Exequy; Wordsworth’s In Memory of His Brother; Lowell’s Sailing Home from Rapallo; Plath’s Electra on Azalea Path and Daddy; Denise Riley's A Part Song;
- Tennyson In Memoriam
- Elegies for Poets (II) Jonson’s Shakespeare; Shelley’s Adonais; Bishop’s North Haven; Berryman’s Dream Songs for Delmore Schwartz
- Self-Elegies (II) Keats’s When I have fears that I may cease to be and This Warm Hand; Christina Rossetti’s Remember; Yeats’s Under Ben Bulben; Edward Thomas’s Rain, Larkin’s Aubade,
- Hardy - Poems of 1912-13
- Elegies for Victims of War: Yeats’s Irish Airman Foresees His Death; Owen’s Futility; Pound from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; Langston Hughes’s lynch poems; Heaney’s Casualty; Michael Longley’s Wounds.
- Elegies for Friends: Yeats In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Mick Imlah (Stephen Boyd) Thom Gunn (Lament) - plus my elegy for Mick, ‘Ravished'
- Muldoon - ‘Incantata’ plus a few others