Book In
Book In is a podcast in which brothers Rupert and Charlie Fordham discuss all things English Literature. From Chaucer to the present day, covering drama, novels and poetry, they cover all the classics and much more, from the UK, Ireland, the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Informative but lighthearted, Book In is suitable for all readers, and will be helpful for students doing GCSE, A-Level and university English degrees as well.
Both Rupert and Charlie have been keen readers all their lives and both studied English at university. For many years Charlie taught English at GCSE and A-level.
Book In
T. S. Eliot – Prufrock, Preludes and La Figlia Che Piange
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The first poem that T.S.Eliot published, in 1915, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and two years later, it was included as the title poem in a collection called Prufrock and Other Observations. It was a sensation; breaking dramatically with the gentle and conventional lyrics of the late Victorian and Edwardian poets of the time, many critics found it pretentious at best and incomprehensible at worst. One speculated that Eliot had thought "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." But Prufrock and the other poems in the collection marked a revolutionary break in literature, and heralded the arrival of modernism, with its representation of the fracturing of western society and the western mind in the wake of the First World War and the work of Freud and Jung as they explained the workings of human consciousness. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss these brilliant and groundbreaking poems, and how they are both an extraordinary break with the past, but also deeply rooted in western culture from Greek and Roman times onwards.