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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 5

Deaths of the Poets

Episode 5

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Deaths of the Poets, Episode 5

Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley explore the life, and death, of poet WH Auden.

Poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley interrogate the myth of the doomed poet. Today they explore the life - and death - of eccentric poet WH Auden.

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 Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies and Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman's leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, 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 life - and death - of eccentric poet W H Auden.

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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