Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying items 1-10 of 36 in total of Poetry For All with the tag "rhymed verse".
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Episode 117: Richard Wilbur, Praise in Summer
October 26th, 2026 | Season 9 | 26 mins 4 secs
21st century, ars poetica, gratitude, joy, nature poetry, poet laureate, rhymed verse, sonnet, spirituality, summer, surprise, wonder
This live episode looks at the power of poetry for defamiliarizing the familiar and increasing our attention to the world around us. We met with First United Methodist Church in Normal, Illinois to discuss Richard Wilbur's sonnet and Abram Van Engen's book "Word Made Fresh."
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Episode 116: Patricia Smith, "XXXL"
October 11th, 2026 | Season 9 | 26 mins 51 secs
21st century, Children, Mother's Day, black history month, love, repetition or refrain, rhymed verse, villanelle
In this episode, we continue our series on the villanelle with Patricia Smith's "XXXL." In this poem, Smith uses the constraints of the villanelle form to create a powerful portrait of familial love.
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Episode 109: Philip Larkin, Aubade
May 9th, 2026 | Season 8 | 24 mins 38 secs
20th century, aging, alliterative verse, aubade, night, restlessness, rhymed verse
This episode continues our series on the aubade (a morning love song) with a dramatic turn. Larkin reinvents the tradition as waking to the fact that every new day brings a person one day closer to death.
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Episode 107: John Donne, The Sun Rising
April 10th, 2026 | Season 8 | 26 mins 15 secs
17th century, aubade, eros and desire, love, rhymed verse
This episode begins a three-part series on the "aubade," a poem to greet the morning (often by wishing the morning away). We discuss Donne's many wonderful techniques and even recite a little Romeo and Juliet.
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Episode 105: Phillis Wheatley Peters, "To the Earl of Dartmouth"
February 19th, 2026 | Season 8 | 25 mins 44 secs
18th century, black history month, encomium, guest on the show, rhymed verse
Today, joined by Professor Kirsten Lee, we read a poem about freedom written on the eve of the American Revolution by Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a book of poetry. In praise to the new British Secretary of State, she guides him how to rule while tying an American love of Freedom to her own personal experience of enslavement.
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Episode 100: Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
October 29th, 2025 | Season 7 | 34 mins 53 secs
18th century, elegy, grief and loss, melancholy, night, rhymed verse
This episode takes us to a graveyard for Halloween and explores one of the most canonical poems in the English language, poised between two huge eras of poetry as it meditates on how "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."
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Episode 96: Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur
September 3rd, 2025 | Season 7 | 24 mins 23 secs
19th century, alliterative verse, anger, christianity, climate change, grief and loss, hope, rhymed verse, sonnet, wonder
Today we look at a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that dwells equally in the grandeur of God and the wreck made of earth. Hopkins wonders how these two aspects of our world could possibly relate, and he holds out hope for the dearest freshness deep down things.
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Episode 83: Emily Dickinson, "I went to thank Her–"
November 27th, 2024 | Season 6 | 20 mins
elegy, grief and loss, nineteenth century, rhymed verse, women's history month
In this episode, we read and discuss Emily Dickinson's poem about the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We discuss Dickinson's innovative syntax, her use of deep pauses, and her meditations on death and grief that create surprising effects in this short lyric.
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Episode 82: Sidney, Translation of Psalm 52
November 14th, 2024 | Season 6 | 26 mins 33 secs
16th century, anger, christianity, hope, poetry in translation, rhymed verse, social justice and advocacy, women's history month
Psalm 52 concerns a lying tyrant and God's impending judgment. Mary Sidney, who lived 1561-1621, was an extraordinary writer, editor, and literary patron. Like many talented writers of her time, she translated all the psalms. Here we talk about translation, early modern women's writing, religious engagements with politics, and the power of Psalm 52.
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Episode 71: Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
April 18th, 2024 | Season 6 | 23 mins 55 secs
19th century, christianity, nature poetry, rhymed verse, sonnet, wonder
This episode dives into the wonderful world of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the musicality of his language, and the vision he has of becoming what we already are.