All Episodes

#229 : Mother Earth and myths of mining and agriculture

#228 - What Ted Bundy did on July 14, 1974

#227 - The Great Fire of London and the destruction of Jerusalem

#226: The Vitality and terror of cities

#225 - The invention of the wheel, and the power of storytelling

#224: Let's talk about William Blake

#223 - How to write two novels at the same time, with Charles Dickens

#222: Seamus Heaney - 10 Essential Poems

#221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist

#220: The working poor and a so-so murder show

#219: When a paragraph changes your life

#218: Poetry to Live By

#217: Voices from 1900-1914

#216: Poets, Prophets, Seeresses & Goddesses from Time & the River

#215: 8 Favorite Poems from "Time and the River"

#214: Two of the Best Poems You've Never Heard of (by William Cullen Bryant)

#213: Van Gogh's Early Years

#212: The Most Popular Story in Ancient India

#211: Who Was William Cullen Bryant?

#210: Memories & Legends of William Shakespeare

#209 - Being a Jew in 1900, Being a Jew Now

#208: Bach & God

#207 - Death, the Gods, and Endless Life in Ancient Egypt

#206 - The Discovery of Indo-European Languages - 1876

#205: Learning to Read, c. 2000 BCE

#204: Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," 1856

#203: Bruce Springsteen Talks About "Nebraska" - 1984

#202 - A Death at Sea, 1834

#201 - Gillian Anderson, & What Women Want, 2024

#200: The Last Days of Walter Benjamin, 1940

#199: The Protestant Reformation Gets Going, c. 1517

#198: Georgia O'Keeffe Finds Herself in the Fall of 1915

#197: A Honeymoon in the House of the Dead in Ancient Mesopotamia, c. 2300 BCE

#196: Morning at the London Docks, c. 1850

First Person: Oppenheimer & the Bomb (from the archive)

"The One Who Sang So Well" (new story)

Notes from the Grid: Rediscovering the Hidden Life

Shakespeare: The Life & Times (from the archive)

Anthology: Poems for Spring (from the archive)

The Great Myths #24: Sigurd & the Dragon (from the archive)

Patti Smith / Mazzy Star & Living Colour / Philip Glass (from the archive)

Great Poems: Shakespeare's "To Be or Not to Be" (from the archive)

Anthology: Visionary Poems from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (from the archive)

First Person: Voices from 1900-1914 (from the archive)

Van Gogh's Early Years (from the archive)

William Blake (new episode)

John Keats: "The poet has no identity" (from the archive)

The Great Myths #2: Gilgamesh, Enkidu, & the Underworld (from the archive)

Bruce Springsteen / Simon Schama / The Iliad (from the archive)

Notes from the Grid: All Things Can Console (from the archive)

Advice from Walt Whitman & W. B. Yeats (from the archive)

The Great Myths #1: Gilgamesh Begins (from the archive)

A Farewell to the Podcast with Theodore Roethke's "The Rose"

7 Poems by H. D. (new episode)

6 Poems by R. S. Thomas (new episode)

4 Poems by Kenneth Rexroth (new episode)

Advice from Robert Pinsky (new episode)

Seamus Heaney: 7 Poems from "North"

Little Biographies

Nostalgia (new episode)

Walt Whitman's Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of "Leaves of Grass" (new episode)

The Most Brutal Scenes (new episode)

Ted Hughes: 14 Poems from "Crow" (new episode)

Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems

Anthology: Poems on Modern Life (new episode)

An Interview with Amit Majmudar (new episode)

Ted Hughes: 11 Poems from "Remains of Elmet" (new episode)

Wallace Stevens: 11 Essential Poems

Ted Hughes: 6 Poems from "River"

Anthology: Poems on Being a Parent

Anthology: Poems About Childhood & Youth

Ted Hughes: 7 Poems from "Moortown Diary"

Britain: September 3, 1939

The new movie "Maestro," & what happens to our earliest dreams

Us Weird Geeks

Anthology: Poems for Autumn

Seamus Heaney: Selected Poems

Anthology: Poetry Friday with The Great Year, Shakespeare, Eliot, Blake, Poems on Work & Poems on Mythology

Caravaggio's Severed Heads / Herodotus Among the Scythians / Ian McKellen on Macbeth

Raising a Musical Prodigy / God's Response to Job

Seamus Heaney: 10 Essential Poems

Psalm 23 / Mary, Queen of Scots is Executed / 3 Poems by Mary Oliver

Shakespeare's Library / Ancient Egypt's Temple Libraries / Seamus Heaney Goes to School

Notes from the Grid: The Perpetual Adolescent

Cities Under Siege: The Gauls Sack Rome / Occupied Paris / William Blake's London

Rachel Carson on the Deep History of the Sea

American Shaman

The Spiritual Significance of Everyday Work

The Midsummer Fire Festivals of Old Europe

Van Gogh: Starry Nights & Sunflowers

Pythagoras: The Life & Times

The Great Myths #23: Odin

Is There Anybody Out There?

Advice from the Beatles

On Seamus Heaney

Advice from William Wordsworth

Da Vinci & His Bodies

Anthology: Poems on How to Live

Advice from Charles Dickens & Alice Munro

Anthology: Love Poems from the Last Four Centuries

The Great Myths #22: The Story of Ragnarok in the Norse Eddas

Give Me Another Tarantula

Robert Lowell: 10 Essential Poems

What Do Writers & Actors Have in Common?

True Horror

The Great Myths #21: The Story of Creation in the Norse Eddas

Old Friends

Ted Hughes: 12 Essential Poems

Ted Hughes: Selected Poems

Robinson Jeffers: 10 Essential Poems

The Great Myths #20: Introducing Norse Myth & Reading the Voluspa

Stephen King's Great Novel of Parenthood & Grief

William Carlos Williams: 11 Essential Poems

Give Me a Tarantula

The Great Myths #19: Farewell to the Celtic Myths, & One Last Story

First Person: The Atomic Bomb

Witches in America, Napoleon in Egypt, & the Invention of the Printed Book

Emily Dickinson

The Voice of Toni Morrison

The Great Myths #18: Celtic Myth and Scholarship

Advice from Seamus Heaney // James Joyce's "Araby"

Notes from the Grid: Simple Awareness

Notes from the Grid: To Criticize the Critic

Walt Whitman's Death Poetry

Walt Whitman's Love Poetry // Whitman & Sex

Advice from Toni Morrison, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, T. S. Eliot // Whitman's Earliest Critics

Anthology: Poems by Lowell, Clare, Barbauld, Finch, Spenser // First Person: Eudora Welty & Helen Keller

Loneliness, pt2 // Shakespeare, Sex & Sonnets

The Great Myths #17: Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Celtic)

"That Jane Goodall Tramp"

First Person: Funeral Home Director // Telemarketer

The Earliest Bookstores I Remember // Picasso's "Guernica"

Advice from Joan Didion, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins & Alice Munro

Jealousy, Part 2

The Great Myths #16: The Story of Taliesin (Celtic)

Anthology: Poems by William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Louise Bogan, Anne Bradstreet, Henry Vaughan

Anthology: Poems by Eavan Boland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Milton, Philip Sidney

Walt Whitman's Mystical Poetry

Standing on Two Feet & the Evolution of Language

Seamus Heaney's Origin Story

Anthology: Poems by William Carlos Williams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Brontë, Alexander Pope, Roy Fisher

The Great Myths #15: The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne (Celtic)

First Person: Rome (AD 64) and America (1832)

Anthology: Is Poetry Important?, & Poems by Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Virgil, R. S. Thomas

Anthology: Poems by Amy Lowell, Thomas Hardy, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, William Cowper

Ted Hughes: 5 Last Poems

Anthology: Poems by Edgar Lee Masters, Tennyson, Mary Robinson, Henry Wotton, and Walter Raleigh

Ted Hughes: A Handful of Short Poems from the 1970s

First Person: London, c. 1615

First Person: Pompeii (AD 79) & San Francisco (AD 1906)

How Did Picasso Do It?

Louise Glück: Poems from “The Wild Iris” & "Ararat"

William Wordsworth: Immortality Ode, and 3 Other Poems

Ted Hughes Responds to Fame

The Great Myths #14: The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel (Celtic)

Ted Hughes's Origin Story

Beethoven on His Deathbed

Poetry & Education in Eighth Century England

Working

First Person: A Waitress in Chicago in the 1960s

Poem: Unfinished Michelangelo

Loneliness

Walt Whitman: “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”

2 Poems for the Holocaust

Walt Whitman Affirms the World

Poems from "Bone Antler Stone"

The Great Myths #13: Oisin in the Otherworld

First Person: Vermont, 1940

The Great Myths #12: Queen Medb of Connacht

First Person: Visiting a Poor Poet in Paris, 1895

The Great Myths #11: How Cuchulainn Got His Name

First Person: Paris, 1785

James Garbarino on Violent Young Men

Seamus Heaney: On "Seeing Things"

Seamus Heaney: 13 Poems from "Seeing Things"

The Great Myths #10: The Book of Invasions (Celtic)

Advice from Beethoven, Joseph Campbell, W. S. Merwin, W. D. Snodgrass

Advice from Flannery O'Connor, Jacques Barzun, Jean Guéhenno

Seamus Heaney: 3 Poems from "Wintering Out," & Interviews with Heaney

Seamus Heaney: 3 Poems from "Door into the Dark" & Interviews with Heaney

Seamus Heaney: 3 Poems from "Death of a Naturalist" & Interviews with Heaney

Hart Crane to His Father

Advice from Leonardo da Vinci, Conrad Aiken, & Others

Four Columbine Poems

Advice from Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, & Others

Jealousy

Episode #100: A Belated Manifesto

The Greath Myths #9: The Many Metamorphoses of the Pig Keepers (Celtic)

Walt Whitman's Life #6: The Books He Read & the Scraps He Saved

Walt Whitman's Life #5: Building Houses & Writing Poems

Walt Whitman's Life #4: Whitman in 1849

Stubbornness

Walt Whitman's Life #3: Whitman & Sex

Walt Whitman's Life #2: Early Politics, the Opera & Theater

The Great Myths #8: The Dream of Óengus (Celtic)

Walt Whitman's Life #1: Whitman's Long Foreground

George Orwell on War

The Great Myths #7: Herodotus on Egypt

So Long, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Great Myths #6: The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Walt Whitman: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

George Orwell on Poverty

The Great Myths #5: Osiris

Laurie Sheck: 13 Poems from "The Willow Grove"

The Great Myths #4: The Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt

The Great Myths #3: Gilgamesh & the Flood

T. S. Eliot: “Preludes”

Andrew Solomon on Growing Up Deaf

First Person: Minnesota at the Turn of the 20th Century

Vermeer in Bosnia

Walt Whitman’s Letter to the Parents of the Soldier Erastus Haskell

George Orwell Down in the Mines

Robinson Jeffers: Poems from “Hungerfield”

Two Bits of Kafka's "Trial" for the Election

"It is so hard to die" - A Story of Depression from 1809

Robinson Jeffers: Six Last Poems

Ezra Pound’s Advice to a Young Poet

Rereading “The English Patient”

Poems for the Lonely & Creative Night

Jung’s Great Dream

Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia”

Louise Gluck: “Messengers”