Elegies

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Drama on 4: Elegies: Part 2. Tennyson's In Memoriam

Part 2. Tennyson's In Memoriam

BBC Radio 4 - Drama on 4, Elegies, Part 2. Tennyson's In Memoriam

Poet Michael Symmons Roberts's adaptation of Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam.

Two of the greatest Elegies in the English language Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam adapted by poet Michael Symmons Roberts.

The stories behind two of the greatest and most influential poetic elegies ever published in English.

Part 2. Tennyson's In Memoriam- starring Holliday Grainger and James Cooney.

Although written centuries apart, in 1637 and 1833, the making and circumstances of these great elegies are full of interconnections, centred on the poetic response to grief and loss. Both Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam were written in response to the sudden unexpected death of a young male friend, striking the poets in their mid-twenties when the poets were students at Cambridge.  The dead men were prodigiously gifted and also poets, early rivals and first readers to the poets who elegised them.

Milton and Tennyson were thereby thrown into personal grief and poetic challenge. But how to make a poetic elegy that honours and reflects that genuine grief whilst rising to the challenge of the first great poetic subject in these young poets' lives? Milton and Tennyson responded to these complex and terrible circumstances with radically different elegies that stand among the finest poems in English literature. 

The line from Lycidas to In Memoriam is clear. Tennyson idolised Milton and wanted his elegy to emulate Milton's expansiveness and profundity. When Tennyson's friend the poet Edward Fitzgerald heard that he was working on an elegy for Hallam, he warned his friend that Milton had already done it all: 'Lycidas is the utmost length that an elegy can reach'


CAST 

Holliday Grainger ..... Emily Tennyson
James Cooney ..... Alfred Lord Tennyson 
Ashley Margolis ...... Diodati 

Elegies was written and adapted from Lycidas by John Milton by Michael Symmons Roberts 
Directed by Susan Roberts. 
A BBC North production

Drama on 4: Elegies

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

A two-part drama telling the stories behind two of the greatest and most influential poetic elegies ever published in English - Milton's Lycidas and Tennyson's In Memoriam.

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Part 2. Tennyson's In Memoriam

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