Colin Burrow

Wendler contributed a dozen pieces to the LRB herself over the years on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Jory Graham, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin.

She died in 2024 at the age of 90, having spent a lifetime, as Colin Burrow observed in the last issue of the LRB, writing about lyric poetry.

She believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things, Colin writes, and conveying the joy of understanding them to others.

Colin Burrow is a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and imitating authors Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Johnson's Shakespeare and the Metaphysical Poets.

And regular listeners to this podcast will have last heard him talking to Claire Bucknell about Byron in an episode from their close reading series on satire.

And the bits of Samuel Johnson that still speak to us now are the bits where he's saying, Gosh, these are wonderful lines, or words to that effect, where he has actually seen something in a particular passage that has done something to him at that moment.

And I think there's a moral there, really, that the thing that makes literary criticism powerful and perhaps reasonably durable is insight rather than elaborate explanation of underlying structures or purposes to literature you know it is a matter of people reading things and conveying the strength of those readings

My thanks to Jan Werner Muller for guiding us through the rather disquieting rise of the AfD in Germany and its implications for Europe.

If you have enjoyed this conversation you would probably enjoy reading the London Review of Books and our current issue which is out now on newsstands near you includes James Meek on council and social housing Colin Burrow on literary criticism and the legacy of Helen Vendler Emily Witt reads Rachel Cusk and Anne Carson goes to a Rosalia gig thanks for listening