The Book Club: John Carey on a history of poetry

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

This week's Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey - emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses. (He's also lead book reviewer for a publication we shall call only the S****y T***s, but we pass over that.) In his new book, A Little History of Poetry, he sweeps us with his usual elan from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the backyard of Les Murray. I asked him (among other things) what constitutes poetry, why 'Goosey Goosey Gander' has it all, what he discovered in his researches, and why the so-called New Criticism got old.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This month, The Spectator becomes the first magazine in history to print 10,000 issues,
0:05.9	and we'd like to celebrate with you.
0:08.3	Subscribe to The Spectator for 12 weeks for just £12.
0:12.2	Plus, we'll send you a bottle of commemorative Spectator gin, absolutely free.
0:17.7	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash celebrate.
0:28.1	Hello and welcome to the Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:33.7	and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor John Kerry, who's a distinguished
0:37.4	academic,
0:38.6	literary critic, author, and the chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. His new book is called
0:44.3	A Little History of Poetry, and it takes us all the way from the epic of Gilgamesh to Les Murray.
0:50.9	John, welcome. Can I stop asking, you do start with almost a sort of one-sentence
0:56.2	definition of poetry at the beginning. And I wondered if you'd be able to expand on that
0:59.6	a little to say, you know, what do you think it is that distinguishes poetry from other forms
1:04.7	of verbal art? Yeah, it's a very difficult question, and you're right. I do sort of sidel out
1:10.1	of it, because I say that
1:11.6	poetry is to language as music is to noise and that music is noise made special so that you
1:20.1	remember it and value it. And poetry is language made special so you remember and value it.
1:27.4	And I say of course it doesn't work always. Countless poems over the centuries have been forgotten. And my book is about ones that have not. It's cheating in a way because it's relying on the valuation and the lastness, which are indisputable, of course,
1:48.6	that be in the poems that we remember, we remember, or are valued.
1:53.5	Poems are valued, are valued.
1:55.7	It's getting away from, of course, what makes the poem special. And I think I deliberately avoid that because it can be
2:05.3	countless numbers of things and will vary in any case from person to person. I very much don't
	...

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