Not Just the Tudors — "How Poets Spoke Truth to Power"

Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Professor Catherine Clarke
Date: December 4, 2025

Episode Overview

In this captivating episode, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb interviews Professor Catherine Clarke, author of A History of England in 25 Poems. They explore how poetry has served as a vehicle for truth-telling, resistance, and the shaping of national identity from the 16th to the 17th centuries. Discussing five poems, the conversation delves into coded messages, subversive voices, and how poetic works reflect both personal and political anxieties, desires, and fantasies.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Poetry? Why 25 Poems?

• Poetry as Time Travel:
  Lipscomb opens by noting poetry’s unique way of connecting emotions across eras:

  “A poem offers us the possibility of direct, even access to the imaginations, experiences and feelings of people in the past... They are, in fact, a way of time traveling.” (02:05)

• Choosing the Poems:
  Clarke sought poems spanning from the earliest conception of England (8th century) to 2022, giving space to diverse voices — class, gender, ethnicity, and even childhood.

  “I wanted the poems to let us listen in to very different and diverse voices and perspectives.” (04:37)

• Why England?
  Englishness is often constructed in poetry (the “Sceptred Isle,” “green and pleasant land”) but not necessarily triumphal.

  “Poetry is intersecting, intimately involved in forming these imaginaries of England and in troubling them as well.” (05:55)

2. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” — Love, Politics & Danger

• The Poem and Its Double Meanings:
  The famous poem, long believed to reference Anne Boleyn, operates in code, navigating courtly politics and love:

  “It’s possible to read this poem [...] as a smoking gun. But... that’s not necessarily the most interesting question to ask. It's doing coded, secretive work.” (08:33 / 08:48)

• Translation as Disguise:
  Wyatt adapts Petrarch, twisting context and symbolism, possibly to shield himself:

  “Does that allow him to hide behind another ‘I’? Is that a guise, a disguise, a cloaking...?” (09:53)

• Biblical and Classical Allusions:
  The hind’s collar (“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am”) references both scripture and Roman myth, hinting at forbidden or politically dangerous desire.

  “There could be a connection.” (14:51)

• The Peril of Words:
  Poetry acts as both confession and armor—vital in a court where new treason laws criminalized certain speech, thought, or even imagination.

  “Treason is a crime that can be committed through words, through writing, through imagination, through craft.” (17:45)

3. Anne Askew’s Newgate Ballad — Faith as Resistance

• Context:
  Askew, proto-Protestant martyr, left her poem and writings after interrogation (and torture) for heresy in 1546.
• Theology as Defiance:
  Her rejection of transubstantiation and calm rationality under torture are foregrounded.

  “She’s bold, she’s resolute, but often quite defiant and sardonic...” (22:49)

• Gender Politics:
  Askew uses both the armor of masculinity (opening the poem as a ‘knight’) and the strategic humility of femininity in her interrogations.

  “She deflects our attention away from that [her suffering body].” (24:48)

• Plain Speaking:
  The plain, ballad form—popular among the people—stands in contrast to courtly or metaphysical verse, asserting honesty and accessibility:

  “A ballad, it’s the kind of poetry of the street, it’s popular poetry.” (29:27)

• Risk and Otherness:
  Her pointed critique of Henry VIII in plain ballad terms was dangerous under the Treason Act.

  “‘I saw a royal throne where justice should have sit, but in her stead was one of moody cruel wit...’ Nobody has said that better.” (34:11)

• Radical Empathy:
  Clarke wrestles with whether modern readers can—and should—empathize fully with someone writing joyfully towards death:

  “I found it hardest to get close to her in terms of empathy, because this poem... she writes of her joy and her hope and her delight, anticipating that.” (35:28)

4. Shakespeare’s “This England” — Myth and Satire

• Lines from Richard II:
  The iconic “sceptred isle” passage is now read as a patriotic poem, but in context is both eulogy and lament.

  “It depends where you end your excerpt... The speech begins... like panegyric... but it’s only later... there’s a dark turn.” (41:49)

• Inventing Englishness:
  The poem perpetuates the myth of England as a divinely-imagined island (excluding Scotland and Wales), linking poetry and politics:

  “England is not an island and never has been. So this imagery... elides the existence of other polities... it’s a political and rhetorical trick.” (44:47)

• Political Dynamism:
  The speech becomes politically dangerous or comforting, depending on historical moment. Essex staged the play pre-rebellion to imply critique of Elizabeth I.

  “It still has that power to praise, but also to be really biting satire and challenge and provocation.” (47:47–50:05)

5. “Bum Fodder” (Alexander Brome) — Satire, Scatology, and Street Politics

• Popular Satire:
  This mid-17th-century broadside gleefully mocks the Rump Parliament with toilet humor—a bottom-up (literally) critique of power.

  “Poetry isn’t always about court and courtiers... This absolutely is... of the street, of popular culture.” (52:20)

• Poetry for the People:
  Printed as disposable, cheap broadsides, these ballads reached both lower and middling classes for entertainment and political expression.

  “Tools of social networking and building alliances and community, and a really crucial part of building that sense of a sustained and continued Royalist community.” (56:18)

• Transformation & Survival:
  Even throwaway poems can survive—this one makes it into 17th-century anthologies and now into Clarke’s “25 Poems.”

6. John Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis” — Rebuilding England’s Capital

• Optimism Amid Catastrophe:
  Dryden’s poem reframes the disasters of 1665–66 (plague, fire, war) as the precondition for London’s glorious rebirth.

  “Rebranding it as the Year of Wonders... is this genius twist from John Dryden, and he’s reimagining those terrible events... as a kind of crucible... out of which comes this tested, purified Greater London of the future.” (60:38)

• Personification of London:
  The city appears as a damaged but ultimately elevated female, whom the world courts. The metaphor echoes the politics (London’s relationship to the monarchy) and deepens the myth.

  “He’s using that feminized imagery to tell a story about the relationship between London and Charles II... London is becoming this powerful, coercive, imperial centre, but Dryden is imagining it as just this desirable maiden with its lovers, eager to please.” (63:13)

• Eyewitness/Imaginative Reportage:
  Despite vivid, pseudo-journalistic description of the fire, Dryden wasn’t present; his poetry blends news and myth.

  “His whole account of the fire is kind of secondhand... And I do wonder whether that is what allows him to so readily move from the historical reality to using the Great Fire as this metaphor.” (62:09)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Poetry’s Slipperiness:

  “...there’s a sort of deliberate, elusive quality to poetry, isn’t there?”
  – Lipscomb (09:21)

• On Treason and Words:

  “Treason is a crime that can be committed through words, through writing, through imagination, through craft... at this moment, ideas that might exist in the mind and the imagination can become treasonous and words become uniquely dangerous.”
  – Clarke (17:45)

• On Henry VIII:

  “I saw a royal throne where justice should have sit, but in her stead was one of moody cruel wit.”
  – (Anne Askew’s Ballad, 21:48, quoted and admired by Clarke & Lipscomb at 34:11)

• On Satirical Poetry:

  “Who doesn’t love 21 stanzas of bum, poo, and fart jokes? But it is also really political poetry.”
  – Clarke (54:25)

• On Empathy and the Past:

  “Poetry can bring us into this kind of close encounter, this close encounter...”
  – Clarke (37:45)
  “That isn’t to erase their otherness...”
  – Lipscomb (37:22)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Poetry as Time-Travel & Selection: 02:05–06:50
• “Whoso List to Hunt” & Coded Love: 07:05–19:20
• Anne Askew’s Ballad on Martyrdom: 19:54–38:20
• Shakespeare’s “This England”: 39:09–47:47
• “Bum Fodder” and Royalist Satire: 50:05–58:10
• Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis” and the Fire of London: 58:50–65:43
• Closing Reflections on Poetry’s Power: 65:43–66:17

Conclusion

With wit and intellectual rigor, Clarke and Lipscomb demonstrate poetry’s capacity to bear witness, challenge power, encode subversion, and even reshape history’s myths. Whether in the voice of a Tudor courtier, a martyr, a satirist, or a laureate, poetry stands as both an archive and an argument—a “time machine into history.”

By focusing on diverse forms, voices, and registers, the episode deftly interweaves the earthy and the sublime, the public and the personal, highlighting how poets, famous or forgotten, have always spoken truth to power.

For further reading:
Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems (referenced throughout the episode).