Christina Rossetti's most famous poetry collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the foremost female poet of the time in England. The poem Goblin Market is one of Rossetti's best known. Although it is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways, seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation, a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency, and a work about erotic desire and social redemption. Rossetti was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes, and it is suggested that Goblin Market may have been inspired by the "fallen women" she came to know. Some works lend themselves to being illustrated better than others, and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has proven irresistible to artists since its first publication. Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, contributed several illustrations for the poem’s first issue.  Following those, the woodcut illustrations of Laurence Houseman, and finally the illustrations of Arthur Rackham, which have become nearly as famous as the poem itself; wildly suggestive, they transform what many perceived to be a children’s story into a tale with very adult concerns. Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti…we begin….  

Just Listen Podcast

Just Listen Podcast: Poetry - Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

Christina Georgina Rossetti, born on December 5, 1830,  was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for "Goblin Market" and "Remember.” She wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in the British Isles: "In the Bleak Midwinter,” later set to music by Gustav Holst and by Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas,” also set by Harold Darke and by other composers. Rossetti's most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the foremost female poet of the time. Hopkins, Swinburn, and Tennyson lauded her, and with the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861 she was hailed as her natural successor.   The poem “Goblin Market” is one of Rossetti's best known. Although it is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways, seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation, a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency, and a work about erotic desire and social redemption. Rossetti was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes, and it is suggested that Goblin Market may have been inspired by the "fallen women" she came to know there. Christina Rossetti’s life was filled with complications. For years she waited on an ailing father, wrestled with depression and illness herself, became the poetic voice of the new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (an avant garde artistic group that included her brother, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for whom she posed as a model in several of his paintings). She struggled with crises of faith, turning down three suitors on religious grounds and had to wrestle with the pressures of fame and notoriety.  Often living in a house with four or five other female extended family members, she developed a keen and wary sense of the struggles and conflicts among women and treated them, in her poems, with the same knowing care and solicitude with which she examined matters of faith and devotion. Some of today’s critics claim that among English poets, Rossetti is second only to Tennyson in terms of musical sound and form.  Others find the resurgent interest in her work an anachronism; whatever one thinks of her, her influence on 19th century poetry is unquestionably rich and diverse. We begin today with a selection of devotional poems, then turn our attentions toward other topics—love, jealousy, and the burgeoning world of Victorian society.

Just Listen Podcast: Poetry - Christina Rossetti

Today we examine the work of two American poets, both of whom are featured in a new book by John Dizikes entitled Love Songs: The Lives, Loves, and Poetry of Nine American Women.  The book’s focus is on a group of nine American women whose work dominated and helped shaped the direction of American poetry. All of them used New York City as the locus for their expansion as poets during the first half of the twentieth century.  Both Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay made important and lasting contributions to American poetry; Teasdale became the grand dame of the love lyric and her poems were part of every lover’s toolkit; during her own lifetime, valentines abounded with her lyrics, many of which dealt with longing, desire, and later, unrequited and disappointing love. Few poets have been able to achieve the soundness of rhyme and meter, of passion and song, as Sara Teasdale was able to achieve in a mere four or eight lines. Perhaps only Emily Dickinson—whose interest was the psyche moreso than the heart—could pack as much meaning and intensity into a lyric phrase as Sara Teasdale. Even so, “…terrified by physical illness,” Dizikes tells us in his book, “and submerged in emotional darkness,” she took her own life in the early evening hours of January 29, 1932, with a warm bath and a heavy dose of sleeping pills. The maestra of the concise love lyric, undone by love itself, and loneliness, disappeared in all but memory from the world that had cost her so much emotionally. Some poems by Sara Teasdale…we begin…. Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for her book The Ballad of the Harp Weaver and brought the 700-year old sonnet form into the twentieth century with new life and voices that presented love lyrics in the everyday idiom of the modern city.  Playing with conventional forms as well as the new free verse, Millay became an important bridge between the old and the new—a familiar voice putting forth controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism.  While Sara Teasdale’s lyrics are often dreamy and redolent of diaphanous, sweet billows, Millay’s voice is more impatient, more practical, more based on the reality of a tasted kiss than on the longing for it. Dizikes tell us, “Millay would be so closely identified with bohemia and with sexual liberation that it seemed as if she had been predestined to epitomize the spirit of Greenwich Village.  The four most often quoted lines of her poetry, still familiar to people who know nothing else she wrote, captured the spirit of the liberated woman: My candle burns at both ends, It will not last the night, But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends It gives a lovely light. Unfortunately, not long after publication of his book, John Dizikes died.  He was the author of four books, including Opera in America:  A Cultural History, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.  He was a professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  A founding member of UCSC’s Cowell College in 1965, he later served as Provost. The John Dizikes Teaching Award, presented annually in recognition of outstanding teaching by humanities faculty, was established in his honor in 2002. Some poetry by Enda St. Vincent Millay…we begin….        

Just Listen Podcast: Poetry - Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay

A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or composite novel) is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts. Short story cycles are different from novels because the parts that would make up the chapters can all stand alone as short stories, each individually containing a beginning, middle and conclusion. When read as a group there is a tension created between the ideas of the individual stories, often showing changes that have occurred over time or highlighting the conflict between two opposing concepts or thoughts. Because of this dynamic, the stories need to have an awareness of what the other stories accomplish; therefore, cycles are usually written with the expressed purpose to create a cycle as opposed to being gathered and arranged later. Today’s story from the Sherwood Anderson short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, is entitled “Loneliness,” and concerns the character Enoch Robinson.  The story also introduces the reader to George Willard, a central character in the short story cycle, whose presence in the stories serves to help construct a unity among the stories and different characters. “Loneliness,” by Sherwood Anderson…we begin….      

Just Listen Podcast: Winesburg, Ohio - Loneliness

Winesburg, Ohio is a 1919 short story cycle by the American author Sherwood Anderson. The book consists of twenty-two stories, with the first story, "The Book of the Grotesque,” serving as an introduction. Each of the stories shares a specific character's past and present struggle to overcome the loneliness and isolation that seems to permeate the town. Stylistically, because of its emphasis on the psychological insights of characters over plot, and its plain-spoken prose, Winesburg, Ohio is known as one of the earliest works of Modernist literature.. Winesburg, Ohio was received well by critics despite some reservations about its moral tone and unconventional storytelling. Though its reputation waned in the 1930s, it has since rebounded and is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industria small-town life in the United States. In 1998, the Modern Library  ranked Winesburg, Ohio 24th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Our first story from this cycle is entitled “Hands.”   In his Memoirs, Sherwood Anderson says that he wrote "Hands" at one sitting on a dark, snowy night in Chicago. It was, he says, his "first authentic tale," so good that he laughed, cried, and shouted out of his boarding house window. "No word of it was ever changed," says Anderson.  Not everyone was in agreement with him, and many criticized his book as a “sewer,” and the author as “sex-obsessed.” “Hands,” by Sherwood Anderson…we begin….          

Just Listen Podcast: Winesburg, Ohio - Hands

During World War II, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis under the direction of German dictator Adolph Hitler.  Many Jewish refugees immigrated to the United States, a pattern that continued after the end of the war.  This story takes place in the 1950s, when many Holocaust survivors like Sobel, the shoemaker’s assistant, struggled to establish new lives in the United States. Today’s author Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Phillip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel The Natural was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, was also filmed and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Today’s story, “The First Seven Years,” depicts a Polish immigrant’s desire to see his daughter achieve a better life.  His notion of that life, however, is not the same as hers. “The First Seven Years,” by Bernard Malamud…we begin….

Just Listen Podcast: The First Seven Years

Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor and the fifth of eleven children, but child mortality was high in the 17th century, often 50% or more, and he was soon the oldest survivor. As an adult, he became an administrator of the navy of England and a Member of Parliament who is most famous for thediary he kept for nearly a decade while still a relatively young man; writing for himself alone, he used a little-known shorthand that was not deciphered until the nineteenth century, when the diary was published, more than 200 years later.  He discontinued the diary when failing eyesight forced him to abandon the project. The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Today’s selections offer us a glimpse into two of London’s most awful moments in time – the Plague and the Great Fire. From the Diary of Samuel Pepys, we begin….  

Just Listen Podcast: from The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Hector Hugh Monroe, also known as Saki, is famous for his tongue-in-cheek commentaries on the upper classes and the quick, startling way in which many of his stories end. To compare today’s story, “The Interlopers,” with other Saki works, look for “The Open Window” and “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” here on Just Listen. A story’s omniscient narrator knows everything that happens, and why. This type of narrator is not a character in the story but an outside observer who can tell you what each character is thinking and feeling. As you listen to today’s story, pay special attention to the information the narrator gives you about the two characters’ pasts. The narrator of “The Interlopers” makes us think that events are leading one way--up until the story’s very end. Prepare to be surprised. “The Interlopers,” by Saki…we begin….  

Just Listen Podcast: The Interlopers

Virginia Woolf was born into intellectual and social aristocracy.  Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an editor and historian.  Her mother was a known and admired beauty, often used as a model for important Pre-Raphaelite painters. Virginia was not sent to school, in accordance with the custom of the times.  She received a splendid education as an autodidact but remained resentful and offended on this account.  Her mother died when she was young prompting her first nervous breakdown.  Virginia took over supervision of the affairs of the household at the age of thirteen. She married Leonard Woolf – an unconventional choice for her.  He was an anti-imperialist, a Jew, and a free-thinker.  From their house in Bloomsbury they began a circle that was hugely influential on British arts and letters and architecture for years.  With a flexible notion of gender preferences, the Bloomsbury group “lived in squares, but loved in triangles.” Leonard and Virginia’s press, Hogarth Publishers, published both non-fiction and fiction, including the first English translations of Freud. Today’s work is one of a number of Virginia’s writings which features a looking glass, and numerous scholars have chosen this image as a focal point for understanding her work. “The Lady in the Looking Glass:  A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf…we begin….

Just Listen Podcast: The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection

"The Lagoon" is a short story by Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. “The Lagoon” was first published in Cornhill Magazine  in 1897. The story is about a white man, referred to as "Tuan" (the equivalent of "Lord" or "Sir"), who is traveling through an Indonesian rainforest and is forced to stop for the night with a distant Malay friend named Arsat. Upon arriving, he finds Arsat distraught, for his lover is dying. Arsat tells the distant and rather silent white man a story of his past. The story is full of symbols and contrasts - such as the use of dark/light, black/white, sunrise/sunset, water/fire, and possibly the most important one, movement/stillness. Arsat's clearing is still, nothing moves, yet everything outside the clearing moves. "The Lagoon" by Joseph Conrad...we begin....  

Just Listen Podcast: The Lagoon

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"  is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard," the poem was completed when Gray was living near St Giles' parish church at Stoke Poges. On 3 June 1750, Gray moved to Stoke Poges, and on 12 June he completed "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Immediately, he included the poem in a letter he sent to Horace Walpole, that said: I have been here at Stoke a few days (where I shall continue good part of the summer); and having put an end to a thing, whose beginnings you have seen long ago. I immediately send it you. You will, I hope, look upon it in light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writing have wanted, and are like to want, but which this epistle I am determined shall not want. The letter reveals that Gray felt that the poem was unimportant, and that he did not expect it to become as popular or influential as it did. Gray dismisses its positives as merely being that he was able to complete the poem, which was probably influenced by his experience of the churchyard at Stoke Poges, where he attended the Sunday service and was able to visit the grave of his aunt, Mary Antrobus, whose death devastated his family. His friend Horace Walpole popularised the poem among London literary circles. Gray was eventually forced to publish the work on 15 February 1751 in order to preempt a magazine publisher from printing an unlicensed copy of the poem. The poem embodies a meditation on death, and remembrance after death. It argues that the remembrance can be good and bad, and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Grey…we begin…..

Just Listen Podcast: Elegy in a Country Churchyard

“The Invalid’s Story” is a raucous story by Mark Twain about a case of mistaken identities and is a testament to how olfactory images can truly color a piece of literature. The story is considered by many critics to have no literary value. Still, even though some critics have panned the story, it is often reproduced in collections of Twain’s stories, and others have noted that it is a good example of the frontier-style humor for which Twain was known. The story details the unfortunate misadventures of two men on a train and their attempts to fight a terrible smell which they mistake for a rotting corpse. In the end, all of their attempts are fruitless. The themes range from mortality and the proper behavior towards the dead, to the power of imagination to overcome reason. It is believed that Twain wrote the story in the 1870s, about a decade after he began what would be an illustrious career.  First published in The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. in London in 1882, the story can be found in The Signet Classic Book Of Mark Twain’s Short Stories, published in 1985.

Just Listen: The Invalid's Story

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson was a British poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of Victorian-era painters. A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw," “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all," "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die," "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure," "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers," and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”  He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Today we examine three of Tennyson’s poems, “Ulysses,” “The Lady of Shalott, and “Tears, Idle Tears.”                  

Just Listen Podcast: Tennyson Poetry

"Michael" is a pastoral poem, written by William Wordsworth in 1800 and first published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The poem is one of Wordsworth's best known poems and the subject of much critical literature. It tells the story of an aging shepherd, Michael, his wife, and his only child Luke. Pastoral poems are poems relating to the countryside, portraying or expressing the life of shepherds or country people in an idealized and almost Utopian manner.   The focus is on the pleasingly peaceful and innocent life of characters who have not been corrupted or spoiled by city and especially court life or the temptations of urban living. Pastoral poems are also known by the names of eclogues and bucolics, Bucolics being the title of the collection of ten pastoral poems written by Virgil. Among the writers who have used the pastoral convention with striking success and vitality are the classical poets Theocritus and Virgil and the English poets Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. From the cusp of the nineteenth century, we here bring you William Wordsworth’s “Michael.”  We begin….

Just Listen: Michael

In March 1941, Virginia Woolf wrote a letter to her husband Leonard. It would be the last letter to her beloved. On the 28th of that month, she filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones and walked into the River Ouse, which ran near her home. Her body was not discovered until the following month. Here is Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband Leonard.  it is a love letter, written in the pain of mental illness and the heavy shadows of despair. And now, today’s story - "The Duchess and the Jeweller," by Virginia Woolf…we begin….