Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Hello everybody, how are you doing today? I hope

you're doing well and I hope your reading is going well. Today we are talking about poetry. And there was a time in which I did not read poetry. I did not listen to poetry. And that was a time in which I was much closer to living the condition of poetry itself,

infancy and childhood. Yes, we enjoy ballads and songs and nursery rhymes when we are little.

But the kind of immersion in great poetry, the

swimming in language and symbol, imagery and sound that I want to talk about today, that kind of

poetry appreciation came during my formative years, in which it was most starkly apparent that I was transitioning

from childhood to adulthood.

And we see constantly, in poetry, through a proliferation of different aesthetic techniques

and rhetorical devices that poets are constantly

trying to return to the golden era, which is the time of their childhood. Or perhaps it's even a

primitive, primordial time. Perhaps when we read great poetry, we feel a return to our collective

childhood. When we read great poetry, we are overwhelmed with a strange, uncanny sense of familiarity,

a nostalgic sense that we have been here before. And perhaps we have even

lived before. And William Wordsworth wrote that there was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

the earth and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in celestial light

...