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Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Deaths of the Poets

Michael Symmons Roberts

Paul Farley

Lauris Morgan Griffiths

Simon Richardson

Book of the Week: Deaths of the Poets: Episode 2: The Names of the Bridges

Deaths of the Poets

Episode 2

Episode 2: The Names of the Bridges

The Names of the Bridges

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Deaths of the Poets, The Names of the Bridges

The authors explore the lives - and suicides - of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath.

Poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley interrogate the myth of the doomed poet. Today they explore the lives - and suicides - of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath.

What is the cost of poetry? Must poets be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive? Or is this just a myth? In our new Book of the Week, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley - both award winning poets themselves - explore that very question through a series of journeys across Britain, America and Europe. 

From Thomas Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.

The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet - exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York - has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet's life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? 

Today the poets explore the lives - and suicides - of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath.

Written and read by the authors
Abridged for radio by Lauris Morgan Griffiths
Produced by Simon Richardson.

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Poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley explore the myth of the doomed poet.

Poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley explore the myth of the doomed poet. Read by the authors.

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