Hello, I'm Thomas Jones, host of the LRB podcast. This year on our Close Readings podcast, there are two bonus series.

One is with Irina Domitrescu and Mary Wellesley, exploring medieval humour. The other, with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford, is on political poems.

You can listen to Seamus and Mark's first episode on Andrew Marvell's Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland right here,

or go straight over to the LRB Close Readings podcast, where you'll be able to listen to the full series as it's released through the year,

along with Arena and Mary's full series and free extracts from all our subscriber-only series.

Just search for LRB Close Readings in your podcast app

or find links in the description. Welcome to this new LRB Close Readings series about

political poems. We have a new format for our new series. In these conversations, we'll be

taking each time a single poem, one which has been understood

and admired, or perhaps criticised, for its politics, or for its particular engagement with

contemporary political history. And as ever, we shall be enlightened and informed by pieces

to be found in the rich gathering of essays and reviews that make up the

archive of the London Review of Books. My name is Seamus Perry and I teach English literature

at Baylill College in Oxford and I'm talking to Mark Ford, poet, critic and professor of English

at University College London. And the poem we've chosen for our first conversation in this series is Andrew Marvell's

Horatian Ode, which is, as Frank Commode says, in a piece he contributes to the London

Viewer Books, a text that it's possible to think the greatest political poem in the language, Mark.

So we're starting at the top.

Yes. And it's political in all senses of the word, isn't it?

I mean, the full title, and Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland,

gives us the moment in history.

It was written in summer, probably June of 1650 and King Charles had

...