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

Summary

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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

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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.

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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])

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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.

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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])

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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]).

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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])

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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])

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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])

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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])

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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.

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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.

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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.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Catherine Clark about her book titled A History of England in 25 poems, published by Penguin in 2025, doing really exactly what the title suggests, which is fascinating because through these 25 poems, some of which are famous, some of which, intriguingly, are less so, we can get a really interesting sense of the history of England. Now, this is not a boring history of timelines and kind of a long list of dates and places. This is much more nuanced and analytical, looking at some really famous moments, but maybe in a different way than we'd expect, and some other aspects of British English history over quite a long period of time. So we. We have a lot to discuss. We're probably not going to be able to touch on all 25 poems equally, but I think we're going to have quite an intriguing discussion nonetheless. So, Katherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[C]

Oh, thank you for having me, Miranda. I'm really looking forward to our chat.

[B]

I am as well. And I think a reasonable place to start would be if you could introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.

[C]

Yeah, of Course. Thanks. So, as you mentioned, I'm a professor. I'm based at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. But as well as a historian, I have a background in English literature. So I've always been really interested in that kind of intersection between literature and history, how we do history through literature and how the two can speak to each other. As another aspect of my job as a history professor, I direct a really amazing history project called the Victoria County History of England. It's not a very helpful name, admittedly. It was founded in 1899 and dedicated to Queen Victoria, which is how it gets its name. And the aim of the project, project is to write the history of every place in England, from the smallest to the biggest, from the very earliest times to the present day. So lots of my role as director of this project, which is active in groups right across England, lots of my role, lots of my job is involved with investigating what England is. In search of England. What is England? Understanding the nation through the most local. Through the smallest places, through the parish, through the neighbourhood. And in a way, this. This book is an extension of that. I'm still in search of England and I'm looking for it through poems. And with my background in literature, I was really interested in how 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. So those. Those were the backgrounds and. Yeah, that's who I am and what I do.

[B]

That's a very helpful introduction. Right. It already answers some questions around kind of why England and why poems, but why 25 poems? Like, did you come up with that number? How did you decide on that many portals into the past?

[C]

Yeah, well, 25. It's a number that I picked. And listeners will recognize that the book is on a. It's a recognisable formula. Right. A history of the world and 100 objects. I think people have an understanding of what this kind of book is going to do. I suppose what I wanted to explore by doing history through poetry is the way that poems can take us. Not just. And you articulated this really well in your introduction, Miranda. Poetry doesn't just take us into the big milestone events of history. It's not just about doing history with timelines and the big landmarks, but poetry can take us inside the experiences, the feelings, the imaginations of people living and breathing through history. That, for me, is the magic there. And also, you know, I've talked about how in the Victoria County History Project, we're doing the enormous, huge history of the nation, but we're doing it from the smallest scale, starting with the local. And poems let us do that as well in what I think is a really magical way. So, for me, the real power and magic of poetry is that it lets us approach those huge, massive historical stories from somewhere on a much smaller scale, something human, something really intimate, very often. So one example I'd give from the book is a chapter that deals with the poem Pearl, written at the end of the 14th century. It's a story in the poem of a father grieving the death of his young daughter, probably dead from the plague. And we all know that huge story of the Black Death. We all know the statistics, you know, 40 to 60% of the population killed. But I think bringing that vast story, those huge numbers down to one individual experience, one loss, one death, one tragedy, that tiny, intimate scale really gives us a different perspective on history. So, yeah, choosing the poems. Oh, Miranda, that was so much fun and also incredibly challenging and difficult. So you really put your finger on it there. So I knew that I wanted a huge range. So the poem covers 1300 years of English history. The very earliest poem in the book dates back to the 8th century, about 732. It's a poem from so called Dark Age Northumbria, spoken by a really unlikely voice, actually by a humble cowherd called Cadmon, right up to the most recent poem, which was published in 2022. So a huge range chronologically. I wanted the poems to take us to different places across England, and really crucially, I wanted them connect us with really varied voices. So there are poems by men and by women, poems by people of different social status and class. There are voices of colour. There's even one poem in the book written by a child. One of my favourites, actually. It's a poem written by Lewis Carroll, long before he was Lewis Carroll, when he was still little, Charles Dodgson, aged just 13, and he wrote a poem to entertain his siblings. It's really funny. It's called Rules and Regulations and it's kind of a spoof of Victorian schoolroom didacticism and mnemonic verse. But it takes us on this fascinating journey into Victorian education and moulding the young men of empire and masculinities and the public school system and its impact on England. So, yeah, 25 poems, but all very different ones that make you laugh, ones that certainly made me cry when I wrote the chapter and that give us a way into these different Voices and, Miranda, we might have more to say about the question of why England? Because it's a thorny one.

[B]

Yeah. Do you want to go into that?

[C]

Yeah. So I think listeners might be wondering why England specifically, and there is a really deliberate reason for that. So this isn't the history of the UK in 25 poems. It's not the history of Britain in 25 poems. And that's because what I trace through the book is a really legible tradition of writing England to being. Shaping ideas of England and Englishness through poetry. You might think immediately of that English pastoral, imaginary, the idea of the green and pleasant land which runs right through the book in a thread. Poems sort of in conversation around that entanglement over time. We think of Blake and the Green and Pleasant Land, but it goes back centuries before, and of course, writers have engaged with it since as well. So 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. So it's very much a focus on England for those reasons.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's definitely a theme that's going to come up in a number of other aspects of our conversation. But I want to stay on this kind of Selecting Poems piece for a moment because it is both really crucial to kind of what you've put together, but also I can only imagine how challenging it would be because you're actually making 50 selections. Right. You're selecting 25 historical moments and 25 poems. So was there any, like, first of all, kind of which went first? Like, did you pick the poems and then the history? Or the history and then the poems? Like, were there any moments where you were like, ooh, I really want to use this poem, but I'm not sure what it's saying historically, or we have to deal with this bit of history, but I don't know which poem could go with it. Like, what were the tricky moments of sorting out those pairings?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think your question reflects a lot of insight into the process. So sometimes I started with the poem. There were poems that I knew told a brilliant story about a moment in history, and then at other points, there was a period in history, a major historical event or movement that I knew that I wanted to cover, and it was about finding the right poem to do that. And I suppose I have to admit, Miranda, that this isn't. It's not a greatest hits book. These are not the 25 best poems in English. So some of them are, you know, they're wonderful. They're poems to cherish. They're poems that I love, that I think many readers will know and love really well. Poems like Adelstrop or Funeral Blues by Auden. There's some Chaucer, there's some Shakespeare. But some of the poems in the book aren't there because necessarily of any literary merit or quality. And we might touch on some of those later, but they're there because they're the best poems to. To tell a story about history, to work as that kind of time machine that I described to really take us into a moment in the past. And yeah, of course there were some poems that I love that ended up on the cutting room floor. I'd have loved to have had a bit of Larkin in there or a bit of John Donne, but actually I'm really happy with the 25 that I have. There's such a variety of poetry and the poem understood quite capaciously and flexibly. So really different kinds of genre from the poetry of the street to a poem written in the Royal Court. A real mixture of material. And I think that they give us that spread into different events from the big milestones to much less well known stories and they take us across that full 1300 years of time.

[B]

You know, I'm really glad you mentioned that this isn't a quote unquote greatest hits. And I want to emphasize that because that's. I don't think anything to apologize about. In fact, I think that's a huge strength of this. This book is not in each moment in history, what was the most popular poem at the time.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And that I'm sure could be a book, but that would be sort of more like a, I don't know, top charts of songs or something like. That's less historically interesting, I think, than the pairing that you've done. So I'm glad we've emphasized that.

[C]

And I think, you know, that has been been done before. You know, there were some brilliant anthologies out there, you know, the nation's favorite poems and these polls get, get every decade or so. And actually I mentioned the poem already that's written by Lewis Carroll when he was 13 year old Charles Dodgson. And in that chapter I kind of, I tackle this issue quite directly because for me, Charles Dodgson's poem Rules and Regulations is in the book instead of Rudyard Kipling's poem. If, if you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs, we will know it really well. And that's a poem that often does top those kind of polls, those votes, those lists of the nation's favorite. But I wanted to kind of do this differently, to include a different voice. Rudyard Kipling is a master dispensing lessons. We all know that there are, you know, this complicated baggage around Kipling's voice there, you know, yours is the world and everything in it. This kind of masculine, imperialist vision. And actually to flip this and have instead the voice of 13 year old Charles Dodgson kind of speaking back, the kind of the people, the subject, the one who's receiving all these lessons that are being dispensed by the masters at school and through Victorian culture. To have his perspective a different way in felt really important.

[B]

Yeah, that's definitely a very key moment in the book. And as you said, you discuss this in the book, right? You say, I'm not using Kipling and instead here's the perspective we're taking. And that's not the only historical period that you make that kind of intervention on. So what different perspective do you focus on? For example, for 1066 or Azincor.

[C]

Yeah. So I mean, I'm not sure how deliberately I always set out. There wasn't a kind of formula here where I thought, and I'm going to kind of turn that story on its head and, you know, tell the story a different way. But I think again, that's the magic of following the poetry that it's does take us to some different stories and some different places alongside the ones that we know. So, Yeah, I mean, 1066, it's a date that is synonymous with history itself, isn't it? We all know 1066, the Norman Conquest, the Battle of Hastings. But what did it actually feel like to live through that, to live in England at that moment, to live in an occupied country, in a landscape that was being militarized with, with the building of Norman castles, with that huge, enormous kind of transfer of power, the dispossession and disenfranchisement of English people as lands are given to William's Norman allies. The impact even on the language itself as Old English loses status compared with the Norman French that's coming in. And the poem that I chose to explain, explore that story is from the Peterborough Chronicles. So one of those continuations of what's usually known as the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, kept by monks writing year by year the history of their country. And so these are English monks recording history as it happens from an English perspective. So it's the English perspective recording the great victory of 1066. And of course they do it differently. And the poem is an epitaph on William the Conqueror, so, you know, lines written on his death. And it's this cool and calm reckoning of William's life that is a really interesting kind of counterpart to William's own project of reckoning, adding up, tallying in, of course, the Domesday Book, you know, assessing the value of his new possessions in England. The poem in the Peterborough Chronicle is kind of reckoning and tallying up William's life and it really finds him wanting. Agincourt again, you know, it's one of those big swashbuckling moments in English history. And lots of us know it through Shakespeare's play Henry V or through the Laurence Olivier film version that was made, you know, in the darkest days of World War II, just as, just as D Day was approaching, or the later Kenneth Branagh film version. And the poem I chose to tell that story to give us a way into the history is the Agincourt Carol. It's this incredibly jingoistic, bombastic, patriotic, triumphalist celebration of the English victory at Agincourt. And it insists on, you know, it's England's victory, God's victory, Henry's victory. But of course, there are other stories about Agincourt. What about Henry's secret weapon, you know, the Welsh bowman who played such a key part in the battle. So I follow that. I think about the context of Agincourt actually, when English power and control is still really precarious, even in the island of Britain itself, with, you know, rebellions, wars with the Welsh and with, with the Scots. And I look at the perspectives of a Welsh chronicler looking at these events. I look at those stories of the Welsh bowmen, often there on the battlefield at Agincourt as a way to rehabilitate themselves after their involvement in the Owain Glyndwr rebellion. Yeah, again, beneath that kind of bombastic, jingoistic veneer, there are all these other really fascinating stories.

[D]

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[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think obviously some of the kind of alternative perspective you look at in those cases particularly is against the traditional one that is very sort of patriotic and saber rattling and that sort of thing. But some of the kind of different perspectives you come across in the book aren't necessarily against that sort of thing. They're just kind of more than the one dimensional picture that I think we perhaps often have. So, for example, medieval monasteries, we're like, yeah, no, we know what that is. It's not like, like necessarily saber rattling or jingoistic, but like it is sort of one thing. Or country houses. We have a very sort of. It's Downton Abbey, right, End of story. Or picturesque ruins, like nice for a picnic until it rains. We have these sorts of ideas that may not be sort of for or against anyone politically, but are kind of, I suppose, tropes that are kind of set in our cultural imagination. And you use poetry to maybe nuance or complicate some of these ideas. So can you take us in a bit to monasteries or ruins or country houses?

[C]

Yeah, well, I'd love to talk about all of them, Miranda, if there's time. So maybe I'll start with the country house, because I love what you're saying about, you know, how so often our ideas about history are moulded and shaped by these received wisdom and the way history has been written in the past or art or literature. And obviously that's one dimension of what I'm looking at in the book, the way poetry itself is involved in kind of shaping our perspective on those moments among the past. But the country house is a great example to start with because I think at the moment there's a particular fascination, I think maybe in popular culture with the country house. I mean, I'm one of those people who loves a trip to a National Trust, stately home at the weekend and a lovely scone at the end. I don't know about you. That's my idea. Idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon.

[B]

As long as I could bring a book.

[C]

Yes, yeah, absolutely. And wellies at this time of year as well. But, you know, my daughter, my teenage daughter is a massive fan of Bridgerton, you know, and loves that kind of world of the glamorous kind of country house and stately home, that invented imagined world. I'm a voracious reader of Jane Austen. I love those kind of worlds. But the poem that I've chosen in the book kind of takes us underneath those imagined worlds of Bridgerton and Jane Austen. So it's one of my favorite poems in the book. I really love it. It's a poem written by a poet called Mary leaper, written around 1745. And Mary Leaper was not wealthy or privileged or learned woman at all. She came from a very humble family in Northamptonshire and she worked in domestic service herself. She was a labouring class woman and she worked as a servant in a country house. I mean, it's actually a really sad story because from her writing that survives, you can see that she was an incredible talent. But she actually died at the age of just 24 of measles. So, you know, just a huge loss. But I realize as I'm saying this, I'm making this sound as though it's maybe a really kind of sad and miserable chapter. There is some poignancy, but the brilliant thing about Mary Lipa is that she is just so funny. And the poem in the book is an extract from her long poem Crumble hall. And she is telling the story of a country house, but in a way that we don't normally see. So in this period, the country house poem was a really popular genre. It's a sort of poem that celebrates the perfection of a country house and its estate. It, it's beautiful. It's an ideal of order and good governance. The speaker is usually a gentleman guest showing us around, walking us through the grand rooms and the gardens of the house. Well, in Crumble Hall, I mean, you can see straight away from the name that it's, you know, it's not this pristine, beautiful, glamorous house. It's a bit of a dilapidated old pile. And Mary Leaper shows us into the places that the typical country house poem doesn't let us see. So she's a servant, she shows us the kitchen, she shows us below stairs, she shows us the cramped passageways and attics that are kind of her geography of the country house. And it's great. You know, the section that I look at in detail in the book, we're in the kitchens where Sophronia Sage, the cook, is kind of making puddings. And what Mary Leaper's doing is she's. She does this amazing trick of bringing together really high flown poetic language, the sort of the language of epic and heroic poetry. But she's describing kitchen tasks, she's describing the cook making puddings or someone doing the washing up. The scullery maid washing up is kind of. She's got a crush on Roger, the serving boy, who's asleep on the table having scoffed all the leftovers and he's snoring. There's this kind of romantic drama going on and, you know, in literature, scullery maids aren't usually allowed to have romantic dramas. So it's doing something quite quirky there. I think what's amazing about the different perspective on the country house that the poem gives us is that it's funny, it's witty, but it's also quietly really radical because it's flipping that world on its head. It's showing us a different story, it's urging us to see the hidden labour that's not usually visible in the traditional country house poem. Everything just runs beautifully by itself. There's no work, there's no effort, there's no sweat, there's no toil. Actually, Mari Lipa is saying, look, this is underpinned by the labour of these labouring class people. But she does it in such a witty and such a humorous way. You mentioned monasteries as well, Miranda. I'm a medievalist by training, so I spend a lot of time looking at monasteries in maastic culture. And yet even so, I think it's hard to shake off that kind of dominant kind of cultural impression of the medieval monastery as somewhere, you know, dark, gloomy, very serious, very po faced, you know, monks in their cells praying or singing or in silence or copying books. The poem that I chose that kind of takes us into the world of the medieval monastery is a 13th century song called Summr is I cummin in summer, Spring, Summer, it's the same word for that. Warm season in medieval English is coming, Spring has arrived. And you might not think you know this song, but you might have encountered it in various forms. It's actually the song that inspired the song that the mice sing in the 1970s children's TV programme Bagpus. When they're mending and fixing things we will mend it Anyway, that's inspired by the tune to Sumuda is a coming in and it's a part song, it's a round like when you sing, I don't know, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree or London's Burning. So it's designed to be sung by a group of people together and it's, it's, you know, that's quite a fun thing in itself. What's really interesting about this song is, is the word. So it's a celebration of spring arriving, but it's, it's not what we'd expect those po faced monks to be listening to at all. It's a song about farmyard animals frolicking. It's quite bawdy. It's animals kind of getting down to business in the barnyard because it's spring procreating. They've got their young. There's a farting stag, quite famously. So, you know, what is this fun round song with its bawdy farmyard imagery and farting animals doing in a book for monks? And I think that sends me on an investigation of the tensions and the contradictions, the beautiful kind of rich contradictions in medieval ecclesiastical culture, where on the same manuscript page, you might have a really serious penitential text from the Psalms, but you might have manuscript art of, you know, strange monsters and bad bombs and knights fighting snails and all kinds of crazy and funny marginal illustration, or, you know, in a cathedral or a church, where you might have devotional imagery in the stained glass and again, quite kind of carnival and crazy carvings around the edge. I give examples of carvings. For example, the church in Kilpeck in Herefordshire, where the Romanesque carving around the outside includes all kinds of weird and wonderful corbels, including a shiel in a gig, you know, a woman bearing her massive vulva. Or just down the road in All Saints Hereford, a tiny carving of a man up in the roof who is, you know, bearing everything, full cock and balls display from up in the roof of the church. So medieval religious culture, monastic culture, ecclesiastical culture is about these amazing contrasts and tensions. It's about making room for the spiritual and the devotional, but also outlets for the more comic, the more bodily, the more funny parts of life as well. And finally, you mentioned ruins, Miranda, and there's a really interesting example, I think, in the book that that follows the idea of the ruin, both in kind of reality but also more than that, in our kind of cultural imagination. So it's a poem by Anna Letitia Barbold, who's a poet that isn't terribly well known today, and she's writing in the early 19th century. And the extract from her huge poem, 1811 that I choose is focused on ruins. So she wrote this poem the same year, and it was published in 1812. And she's another fearless woman writer. This is a political poem. It's a satire. She is an advocate for reform. She is warning against what's going on in contemporary politics. Some of this sounds a little bit familiar, Miranda. She's asking her readers to think about the relationship between England and America. Of course, America has newly become its own independent nation, and she sees a feature in which power and influence are moving west to America and away from England. She sees England as in decline, fading into irrelevance due to the bad decisions being made by politicians. I'm not gonna say anything. Listeners could kind of draw their own lines between later political episodes and questions. And what she does in the poem, it's really audacious and brilliant. She is writing a kind of future history of England, a speculative future. She imagines England in the future as a land that has collapsed, faded into ruin. It's a landscape of ruins, of loss, of decay. And she imagines American tourists, young American men coming on their own grand tour, which of course was so fashionable in the early 19th century, in the late 18th century. She imagines them coming on their grand tour to England, just as English men would go on grand tour to see the ruins of Greece and Rome and Egypt, and they want to see the cradle of their own civilization which has now passed into ruin. And she takes us on this tour around England where we see Cambridge, we see Stratford, we see many different places associated with English culture and power that are now ruined. And most powerful of all, she takes us to London and we see London in ruins. We see the city kind of reabsorbed by nature by the reeds and sedge of the Thames. And it's this kind of elegiac landscape is also, I mean, it's. For me, I love a good post apocalyptic film, I love a good zombie film. And it's as powerful and compelling as any of those as we walk through the. This uncanny landscape of England in ruins. And so that's the centre of the chapter and those 19th century stories are the ones that I'm telling. But, you know, I also look back and forwards even, you know, even in the earliest literature from England and from Britain as well, ruins are used to present cautionary versions of what the nation might be in the future. So this again is about poetry being part of a tradition. I mean, for Anna Letitia Barbell, this, this poem was kind of too hot to handle, really. It was too dangerous, it cut too close to the bone. And the reviews for it were terrible. You know, her contemporary audience just couldn't take it. And she was, you know, as we would say today, she was basically cancelled for it. I was lucky enough to work with a first edition in Senate House Library and the University of London. And it is just this kind of tattered, ragged pamphlet and really, you know, gave me an insight into how some of the texts that I look at in the book through various different vagaries of history, a bad critical reception or just the ravages of time. It's, you know, it's such a precarious chance that They've managed to survive.

[B]

Yeah, no, that's definitely worth mentioning as well. The kind of what options you even had to choose poems and investigate history is not inevitable. Right. Is contingent on so many things. But thank you for taking us through some kind of iconic imaginaries of England and how poetry can be used to sort of nuance our perceptions of them. We can, of course, go the other way though, Right. Using poetry to investigate history. You also, of course, use history to sort of investigate poetry a little bit in some of the examples too. So this, I think applies more to. Well, I guess it's the same idea. Right. Things we think we know really well that once you start to poke around more deeply, you go, actually maybe there's something more or different going on. So, for instance, Auden's Funeral Blues, I think would definitely fall in the category of a quite well known poem. What do you do with it in the book?

[C]

Yeah, so Funeral Blues, I think it's a poem that most of us know really well and love Stop all the Clocks. I think for a lot of people, probably for myself, actually their first encounter with it might have been in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. I don't know if you remember the bit, Miranda, where John Hannah's character reads the poem at the funeral for his partner Gareth. And it's incredibly moving. And I watched that as a teenager and it had a huge impact on me and sent me out to kind of discover more Auden. And it's a poem that is very much loved. It's been used in many public as well as. As private commemorations of grief. I think it's, you know, spoken to many of us at times of loss and difficulty and mourning. But the poem has a really surprising backstory. So the poem originally appeared in a play co written by Auden and Christopher Isherwood called the ascent of F6. And it. It's a play about an English expedition to climb a mountain far, far abroad as a kind of colonialist, imperialist endeavour. And this English hero, this mountaineer, is sent to climb the mountain and he's warned by local people that there's a demon at the top. And this is dismissed as kind of primitive native superstition. But he climbs this mountain and the play shows us the English audience waiting at home, hanging on the news, kind of totally invested in this as an endeavour that's all about showing English power and that's about bolstering English pride and patriotism. So they're hanging on every development. Well, Forbes Ramson gets to the Top of the mountain. And he discovers that there is a demon. And it's all very complicated. All his companions have died and he dies on the mountain. And the poem Stop all the Clocks is performed in the play after his death as a kind of eulogy for the fallen great hero. But it's quite different in the play. The first two stanzas are the ones that we know, and then it becomes. It becomes crazy. It kind of descends into sort of complete absurdity. It ends up the final stanza. Gun, of course, will drive the motor hearse. None could drive it better, most would drive it worse. He'll open, tip the throttle to its fullest power and drive him to the grave at 90 miles an hour. I mean, there's no mistaking that it is not that kind of sincere, moving expression of grief that we understand the poem to be, but it's something really absurd. And Auden is writing the poem in the 1930s and in its place in the play as part of a kind of a satire on the cult of the great man, that kind of nationalist invention of the myth of the great hero who can save a nation. And, of course, think about the context in the 30s. This is. This is dangerous stuff. This is happening, you know, in that historical moment. Think of the rise of, you know, Hitler or Franco or Stalin or Mussolini. These. These great men who invent cults around themselves, who are adored by many of their followers, who are bringing with them immense danger. And Auden can see these looming, gathering clouds of war on the horizon. And I think what's really interesting, looking at Stop all the Clocks is we can still see some traces of that satirical, absurd first version of the poem there, that the two first stanzas are exactly the same as in Auden's play. And actually, if you think about. Is a bit absurd, isn't it? You know, silence the dog from barking with a juicy bone Let the traffic policeman wear white gloves, you know, white bows on the public doves, aeroplanes writing in the sky the message he is dead. It's not the conventional decorous language of elegy. Part of that is because. I think part of the humour there and the sort of satirical effect is because Auden, instead of writing through the timeless imagery of nature and the seasons and loss, where elegy often goes, is he's kind of marrying the language of loss and elegy with the trappings of modernity, of consumer culture, of the new technology of the 1930s. And it just seems like quite an incongruous kind of meeting there. Auden did Rewrite the latter part of the poem and we have the verses that we know and love that open out into that incredibly moving expression of grief. He was my north, my south, my east, my west, that kind of that expression of lost, pack up the stars, you know, nothing is wanted anymore. But I think actually the poem works so well because it retains some of that absurdity, some of that ridiculousness from its original satirical function. Because, you know, there is something so almost absurd and unreal about that experience of grief. The kind of the outrage that the world continues turning. You want to kind of stop it in its tracks. You want aeroplanes writing in the sky. You want. You want everyone to understand this. You know, it seems wrong that the world keeps turning. So I think there's something that poetry doesn't often say that's really honest about grief in Auden's poem, and that's partly because of that moment in which he was initially writing.

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[B]

I love being able to look at this and going, well, hang on a second. There is actually an element of this that is kind of, I mean, satire, but also to some extent like almost a protest poem or kind of, hang on a second, like, let's poke at sort of what the official narrative is.

[C]

Absolutely. And I think, you know, Miranda, we. I'm sure your listeners are joining the dots already, but, you know, it feels like we could really be listening to Auden's poem today in the world that we live in. It's got a lot to say to us. But, you know, there are other poems that also we know well that have got a very different. Take us into a different story in the book. I'll just mention briefly adelstrop by Edward Thomas, which is another of those really beloved poems in the book. You know, it captures that moment, that brief moment of quiet stillness on a railway station platform. The train stops there, nothing happens. There's the sound of birdsong and then the train pulls away. And it feels like that's a poem, a kind of an anti history poem. A poem? Absolutely. Not about the big timelines and milestones and events of history history, but it's a poem that was inspired by a stop at a railway station in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War. And the poem was written in early 1915 in a really changed world. And it was first published in spring 1917, tragically, just a few days after Edward Thomas was killed in action at the Battle of Arras in northern France. And. And so the poem in the book takes us from that still peaceful moment at the railway station into a huge story of the Great War and the transformation of Europe over those years. Again, you know, it seems counterintuitive to think of Adelstrop as a war poem. There are no, you know, bayonets, there's no bayonets, there's no barbed wire, there's no blood. It's not a conventional war poem set in the trenches. But I think, you know, the power of going back to that poem, rereading it, understanding that moment of stillness as a way into a story about what was lost. It's an elegy for a time that was just destroyed in the following months. I think that's really powerful.

[B]

In fact, there's some others that I'd love to add into this section of our conversation that kind of may not seem like critiques necessarily, or maybe they do, but they maybe take us to moments that are less familiar than those two that you just mentioned. So we've got one around the practices of child labour in the Victorian period that I think we can maybe talk about and to go way further back in time, but fascinatingly making some of these same sorts of points, we've got a poem that is critiquing government policy, potentially even of appeasement towards Vikings. And usually we think about appeasement with Hitler. So what are these poems doing in terms of poking at kind of accepted grand narratives?

[C]

Yeah, so I love that you've picked two examples that are so far apart in terms of history, but, yeah, as you say, they're kind of doing some similar things. So the first poem and chapter that you've pointed to is, I think, a really powerful one in the book. So this is a poem written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so a really well known name there in 1842, and it's a poem called the Cry of the Children and it's responding very specifically to two historical events. One is a devastating accident in a coal mine in the summer of 1838, the Husker pit disaster. There was a heavy summer rainstorm in South Yorkshire and the drift tunnel into a mine was flooded. 26 children were in that tunnel and they were trapped against a door they couldn't escape and they were drowned. Their age ranges from seven years old upwards. In the newspaper coverage of the disaster, the age of one of the children is given as nine and a half. And it's details like that. I think as I was doing the historical research for this book that, I mean, that just. It brings me up short every time I think about it, actually. Nine and a half, you know, the way a child might give their age or maybe a doting parent. So 26 young lives lost and this, this disaster, this accident caused outrage in Victorian Britain and it renewed campaigning against child Labour. And in 1842, another really important event, a Royal Commission on the Labour of Children in Mines and Factories published its report. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning is writing in direct response to the accident in the pit and to this report, which is also very harrowing. Read testimony from children, you know, describing, you know, working down in the mine. Young children, 7 year olds, smoking a pipe to stay awake. One young child is interviewed and this noted in parentheses afterwards he talks about recovering from an accident when he was burned. And it's just noted at the side, his face is very badly disfigured. These are really primary school age children. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was shocked by what she read and she writes this poem in response, the Cry of the Children. Now to us today, it's a very sentimental poem, perhaps even a bit maudlin. She has these children. It's springtime. All the other young animals like in Summariza coming in, are kind of frolicking and enjoying the spring, except for these young children who don't get to play, they don't get to look at flowers, they're in the darkness, working underground or in mines and factories. And they say, you know, perhaps it is better when we die before our time. And she's kind of imagining these voices speaking for the children. Not all her first readers were impressed. An early reviewer complains that it's too sentimental and says, you know, she's written in poetry, but we mean here to speak in prose and spells out you know, in more, more deliberate and detailed and realistic terms, what actually happens to a child in an industrial accident and how maybe it's not actually great if they die before their time by having their shoulder ripped out of its joint or being pounded to death in an industrial machine. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she's really clever, she knows her audience. And this is just at the moment when the Victorian ideal of the child is being invented and she is writing for middle class readers in their parlors. She's deliberately tugging on their heartstrings. And this is an. An activist sentimentality. She's doing this to effect change, to get people involved in this campaign for reform. And it worked. This is a poem that had a real impact. You know, reading it today, I think what stays with me as I read the poem is the imagery that she turns to and she kind of cranks up and becomes almost unbearable in the later stanzas of the poem of we wheels turning, wheels grinding. And she's taking that imagery that is actually quite beloved by the Victorians. The wheels of industry, the wheels of empire, the wheels of progress. And she's showing us instead those young lives that are crushed beneath it. The poem did make a difference. So, yeah, you also pointed to a poem, gosh, I'm not great at my maths, but many centuries, many centuries before Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And this is an Old English poem about a battle fought against the Vikings in the year 991. And the poem was probably written just a few years later, so maybe around the year 1000. So it's written in Old English, a much earlier form of English. I include both the original and a translation in the book. And the battle against the Vikings, it was an invading force on the Essex coast near Maldon, and the English army was led by the elder men of Essex, Birtnoth, and they fight against the Vikings kings. Actually, the battle was a disaster for the English. It was a huge defeat, a huge loss. It was a bit of a massacre of the English. But the poem spins that military defeat into a kind of victory for English honour and values and pride. And what's really interesting is that although at first reading it seems like timeless, heroic verse, you know, warriors brandishing their weapons and giving rousing battle speeches and then, you know, really compelling depiction of the battle itself. Actually, it's a political and propagandist poem. It's doing work in its historical moment, just like Elizabeth Barrett Browning was doing in hers. And what the poem is doing, it's engaging with the very, very unpopular political policy of Danegelt, of paying off the Vikings. You used the word appeasement, Miranda, Appeasing the Vikings danegelt tax levied on the English money that was raised so that the Vikings could be paid off instead of fighting them. And in the poem that is dealt with really quite, quite head on. The Vikings offer Birchnoth a deal. Pay us and we'll leave feogh with Fredere. They say, wealth in exchange for peace and your life. And he refuses to this. And he says, actually the only tribute he's going to pay them is with spears. You know, that is throwing spears at them. You know, weapons, violence, killing. And what's really interesting in the poem is that Bertnoth, this great leader, is described as being an rad, is the old English word, an and rad. Rad meaning mind or advice or counsel. And an single. He's single minded. He's a resolute, clear, determined mind. Now, now, you might want to compare that with the English king at the time who was Aethelred unraad. Aethelred the unready, unrad actually meant no advice, no counsel, weak mind. So the poem seems to be doing this really subtle and clever but very deliberate and very resonant political work, saying, look, Birhenoth is the kind of hero that we need. He's standing up and fighting the Vikings things. Aethel Rudd is the kind of weak leadership that we don't want. Who's paying them off? Who's kind of letting down, you know, traditional English honour and pride. But, you know, it's really complicated because the sort of the idea of Englishness that the poem is invoking, you know, England should be proud, it should be fighting hostile invaders, it has these values to uphold. You know, it's pointing to that even as these ideas are just starting to be invented, the idea of England is only just coming into being. And what I find fascinating is that, you know, even at the end of the 10th century, nostalgia is being used to invent this idea of England. And, you know, coming back to your word appeasement, Miranda, today there's a statue to Bertnoth and the Battle of Malden at Malden in Essex. And it uses the word appeasement to describe the battle that it was a kind of. Of a refusal of appeasement, a refusal to pay off and appease the Vikings. And it's another great example, I think, of how our interpretations of history, of how poetry can make those connections across time. Often the Battle of Malden is evoked in other contexts 20th century contexts where appeasement was seen as the weak choice, and fighting and upholding right and justice was the right thing to do. But, you know, I think there are real connections between those poems, the Battle of Malden and the Cry of the Children, even centuries apart. Because what both are doing really cleverly is using emotion. It's creating an emotional impact on their readers and using that to create a response and to make an intervention in their own moment. Because poetry is not just written to report or to describe or to represent historical events. The brilliant thing is poetry is written to make something happen. It's written to make an intervention, to do something in its own time. It's got skin in the game.

[B]

Well, with that rousing cry for poetry and what it can do, what's the last poem in the book? And why did you choose this one?

[C]

Yeah, so the last poem in the book was published just a few years ago. It was published in 2022. And it's a poem by Zafar Kouniel called the Groundsman, from his collection England's Green. And the poem is. It's sort of a sonnet, but it overruns. It runs on. And I might come back to that. And it's a poem that. It's written in character. Kuniel is in character as a groundsman walking around the overgrown boundary of a cricket pitch. It's high summer, and the boundary is overgrown in the kind of splendid, magnificent, kind of heady verdure of summer. And the grantsman, the poem tells us, is retired. I mean, obviously, there are lots of different kind of meanings to that in a cricket context, but it seems to be a kind of elegiac, poignant looking back. And what the poem is doing very cleverly, is it's a kind of looking back over England, English literature, English history. And it's a poem that opens up questions about what England was in the past, what it is today, and what it might be in the future. The groundsman is skimming his fingers through the overgrown grasses and plants in this summer hedgerow. And tiny details there take us into moments of history. Queen Anne's Lace, a flagpoled can, a can stuck on a stalk, you know, opens up questions about identity and patriotism and, you know, my goodness, flags. We've heard a lot about those recently, haven't we? And what I love about Kuniel's work is that his poetry is so allusive. It's so often in conversation with other poetry, we get a little cheeky reference to the Charge of the Light Brigade in a description of hazy light in the poem. It gives us so many connections with what we've thought about already, but it also opens up questions about what England is going to be next. And for me, it also brings us back to that imagery of. Of the green and pleasant land really firmly. And also opens up some challenging and some difficult questions about, you know, we've seen over the centuries this persistent and productive and enchanting kind of coupling between England, the nation and its pastoral imaginary. But we know, you know, we know that that is precarious now. You know, climate change, ecosystem loss, degradation of our environment, seasonal change. I find that quite interesting and quite challenging. And Kuniel's poem opens up some questions there. What kind of stories are we going to tell about England and feature in poetry or elsewhere? What kind of imaginaries will we make if the idea of the green and pleasant land becomes something that is confined to the history books, confined mind to the lines of verse? So, yeah, Kinyard's poem. As soon as I read it, I knew that there was no other choice for the last poem in the book. It's brilliant.

[B]

I think that's a lovely place as well to end our discussion on the book as a whole, leaving me with just the question of whether there's anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of.

[C]

Well, I'm in the really early stages of something, Miranda, so I don't want to jinx it by saying too much, but what I am doing is I'm. I'm writing. And again, I'm interested in those kind of intriguing edges between history and literature. And I'm getting a bit muddy as I do it. And that is all I will say at the moment.

[B]

I love it. Intriguing cliffhanger there. And while you are off investigating and getting muddy in your secret project, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing that is out and available, published by Penguin in 2025, titled A History of England in 25 Poems. Catherine, thank you so much for joining podcast.

[C]

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.