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
Butterflies, Sci-Fi, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
On this episode we take a detour from the four Hawthorne Sci-Fi stories to explore a critical symbol in literature and science fiction: the Butterfly. That's right, the butterfly.
I'll be telling you the myth of Cupid and Psyche and reading the poem "Ode to Psyche" By John Keats.
By the end of this episode you will have a better understanding of how symbols can be used by a master storyteller to add to a story, the similarities between symbols, allegories, metaphor, simile and analogy, and where specific symbols originated.
This may sound like a boring discussion about an academic subject. I hope, however, that I have taken examples from literature and poetry and shown you how these can improve you life, enrich your readings, and shape your consciousness. For, no art more than literature can do all of these, and in so short a span as a few power lines of prose.