The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
Metaphysical Mondays #1 The Flea by John Donne
How does a 17th century poet ask a woman for sex? Join in for episode 1 of Metaphysical Mondays where we explore Donne's most famous poem, The Flea, and we see him do just that.
In this new series I'll be exploring a poetic school that preceded the Romantic Movement: The Metaphysical school.
This refers to what Samuel Johnson called a "race of writers that may be terrmed the metaphysical poets," they were writers who were "rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure, asEpicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion."
Now a broader understand of this school is actually that it "expresses emotion within an intellectual context."
It is impossible to understand the world we live in without a grasp on the words, thoughts and actions of other societies and other eras. This allows us to transcend our own era and compare the way that we live, think, talk and act with the ways of others.
Moreover, these stories and poems add to our lives by giving us more examples of how we, today, can indeed choose to live our own lives.
In this poem, for instance, we will hear a man ask for sex. But it won't be the way that you or I may think about seducing a woman. But maybe it should be? Maybe making fun and even outrageous metaphors is not the worst way to enjoy the process of making love.
You decide.