Episode Summary: Catherine Clarke, "A History of England in 25 Poems" (Penguin, 2025)

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Professor Catherine Clarke
Date: January 17, 2026

Overview

In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher speaks with Professor Catherine Clarke about her new book, A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025). The book explores English history through the lens of poetry, using 25 poems—some well-known, some obscure—as “time machines” to illuminate pivotal events, experiences, and evolving ideas of England and Englishness. Their conversation delves into the selection process, how poetry complicates or subverts cultural clichés, the entwined workings of history and literature, and what poetry can do to shape, reflect, or challenge national imagination.

Guest Introduction and Book Genesis

• Prof. Catherine Clarke is a historian based at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, with a background in English literature. She also directs the Victoria County History of England, a long-running project chronicling English history at a granular, local level ([02:20]).
  • “I’m still in search of England and I’m looking for it through poems…Poems can work as kind of time machines that can transport us back into moments in the past. The way a poem can be a sort of portal that allows us to enter into a moment in history.” ([03:11]–[04:01])

Why England, Why 25 Poems?

• The book deliberately focuses on England—not the UK or Britain—to trace a literary tradition of defining, challenging, and imagining England and Englishness through poetry ([08:09], [09:18]).

  • “Poetry has always been involved in that tradition, and it's always been involved in making and in disturbing and troubling and unpicking ideas of England.” ([09:09])

• The number 25 echoes familiar historical anthologies (“a history of the world in 100 objects”), but it enabled a variety across 1300 years—from an 8th-century cowherd-poet (Caedmon) to Zafar Kunial’s 2022 poem ([04:17]–[08:07]).

  • The selection aims for diversity: spanning time, geography, social class, gender, age, and perspectives.

Selection Process & Rethinking the Canon

• On pairing moments and poems: Sometimes the historical moment defined the poetic choice; at other times, a poem’s unique perspective dictated the focus ([10:00]).
  • “It's not a greatest hits book... Some poems are there not for literary merit but because they're the best poems to tell a story about history, to work as that kind of time machine.” ([10:00]–[12:19])
  • Notable decision: excluding Kipling’s “If—” for a rare childhood poem by Lewis Carroll, subverting the usual voice of imperial mastery in favor of the wit and irreverence of a 13-year-old “receiving all these lessons” ([12:19]–[13:44]).
    • “Rudyard Kipling is a master dispensing lessons… to flip this and instead have the voice of 13-year-old Charles Dodgson … felt really important.” ([12:41])

Poetry Complicating National Clichés

Country Houses

• Traditional country house poems: idealized, gentlemanly, untouched by labor.
• Clarke spotlights Mary Leapor, a servant-poet whose “Crumble Hall” (c.1745) offers a “witty, radical” view by guiding readers below stairs to scenes of work, romance, and the everyday lives of servants ([20:22]–[24:26]).
  • “What’s amazing… it’s flipping that world on its head… urging us to see the hidden labour... underpinned by labouring class people. But she does it in such a witty and humorous way.” ([23:46])

Monasteries

• The stereotype: stern, colorless, solemn places.
• The chosen poem (“Sumer is icumen in”, 13th c.) is a bawdy, joyous, animal-filled round sung in monasteries, subverting the “po-faced” view and highlighting contradictions of medieval religious life ([24:26]–[29:54]).
  • “Medieval religious culture... is about making room for the spiritual and the devotional, but also outlets for the more comic, the more funny parts of life as well.” ([29:41])

Ruins

• Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “1811” (1812) imagines England decayed and visited by American tourists—a political, anti-imperialist warning both topical and prophetic ([29:54]–[32:10]).
  • “She is writing a kind of future history of England… as a land that has collapsed, faded into ruin.” ([30:28])
  • The poem’s reception was hostile; Barbauld was “basically cancelled” for its audacious critique ([31:58]).

History Illuminating Poetry (and Vice Versa)

Familiar Poems, New Angles

W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”

• Most know it as a personal elegy (popularized by Four Weddings and a Funeral), but the poem started as a satirical protest in a play about the “cult of the great man” and imperial folly in the 1930s ([33:06]–[38:58]).
  • “There's no mistaking that it is not that sincere, moving expression of grief that we understand the poem to be… Auden is writing as part of a satire on the cult of the great man.” ([36:50])
  • The juxtaposition of absurdity and grief mirrors the dislocating reality of loss and the political context of the era.
  • Memorable quote:
    “There is something almost absurd and unreal about that experience of grief… you want everyone to understand this. It seems wrong that the world keeps turning.” ([38:08])

Edward Thomas’ “Adelstrop”

• Not an obvious war poem, but a 1914 snapshot written on the eve of the First World War, mirroring the lost peace it would soon mourn ([40:10]–[42:08]).
  • “It’s an elegy for a time that was just destroyed in the following months. That’s really powerful.” ([41:47])

Poetry as Protest and Debate

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1842)

• Written in furious response to child labor disasters and a government inquiry, it deploys deliberate “sentimental activism” to galvanize outrage and reform ([42:50]–[47:50]).
  • “This is an activist sentimentality… the imagery… becomes almost unbearable: wheels turning, grinding… showing us those young lives crushed beneath it.” ([46:38])

The Battle of Maldon (Old English, c. 991–1000)

• On the surface, a heroic lament for noble warriors; covertly, a political critique of royal policy (“appeasing the Vikings”)—the roots of what later ages would call appeasement ([47:51]–[52:20]).
  • “It’s doing very deliberate, very resonant political work, saying look, Byrhtnoth is the kind of hero we need… strong, single-minded; Aethelred is the weak leader.” ([50:32])
  • “Even at the end of the tenth century, nostalgia is being used to invent this idea of England.” ([51:23])
  • “Poetry is not just written to report… it's written to make something happen. It's got skin in the game.” ([52:13])

The Book’s Finale: Imagining England’s Future

Zafar Kunial, “The Groundsman” (2022)

• The closing poem looks forward: a meditative, layered piece about a groundsman walking England’s green boundaries, packed with literary and historical allusions, pondering change, memory, and ecological threat ([52:28]–[55:37]).
  • “It opens up questions about what England was, what it is today, and what it might be… It also opens up questions about what kind of stories we’re going to tell about England in the future… if the idea of the green and pleasant land becomes something confined to the history books.” ([53:36]–[54:39])

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Selection:
  “Some of the poems aren’t there because of any literary merit… they’re the best poems to tell a story about history, to work as that kind of time machine.” ([10:37])

• On Poetry and National Myths:
  “Poetry has always been involved in making and disturbing and troubling and unpicking ideas of England.” ([09:09])

• On Poetic Activism:
  “The brilliant thing is poetry is written to make something happen. It's written to do something in its own time. It's got skin in the game.” ([52:13])

• On Revisiting Familiar Poems:
  “It feels like we could really be listening to Auden’s poem today, in the world we live in. It’s got a lot to say to us.” ([40:10])

Key Timestamps

• [02:20] — Clarke introduces herself and her interdisciplinary background.
• [04:17] — Why 25 poems? The role of range and variety.
• [09:09] — Why England (not Britain/UK)? The poetry and myth of Englishness.
• [12:19] — Rejecting “greatest hits”; featuring lesser-known, more illuminating voices.
• [20:21]–[24:26] — Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall” and the radical country house.
• [24:26]–[29:54] — Bawdy monastic song disrupts medieval stereotypes.
• [29:54]–[32:10] — Anna Letitia Barbauld’s imagined England in ruins; poetic prophecy and controversy.
• [33:06]–[38:58] — Auden’s “Funeral Blues” as satire and cultural touchstone.
• [40:10]–[42:08] — Edward Thomas’ “Adelstrop” as quiet war elegy.
• [42:50]–[46:40] — Barrett Browning’s activism in “The Cry of the Children.”
• [47:51]–[52:20] — “The Battle of Maldon,” poetic memory, and long histories of “appeasement.”
• [52:28]–[55:37] — Kunial’s “The Groundsman” and poetry’s power to shape future imaginaries.

Closing & What’s Next

• Clarke teases her “muddy” next project at the intersection of history and literature ([55:47]).
• The episode underscores poetry’s ongoing relevance: its power to complicate, protest, memorialize, and connect communities across centuries.

For listeners, this episode delivers a nuanced, illuminating look at how poetic voices carry and contest the stories of England—encouraging us to listen afresh, both to poems we thought we knew and those we may be encountering for the first time.