Why are there so few decent poetry podcasts?

The late John Berryman described A.E. Housman as ‘a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet… and a great scholar’. The Times obituarist went further, declaring Housman to have been, on occasion, ‘so unapproachable as to diffuse a frost’. That such a man could be so moved by a cherry tree in spring and by the dales of Shropshire in autumn says something about the separability of art and life.

The greatest contradiction for Frank Skinner, whose poetry podcast has returned for a ninth series, lies between Housman’s work as a Cambridge classicist and his verse. As Skinner observes, there are relatively few classical allusions in A Shropshire Lad, one of the most accessible collections of the late 19th century. The poet’s metrical phrasings are far removed from the cadences of classical scholarship.

The topography of some of the poems is also, it has to be said, scandalously inaccurate, as any pilgrim can tell you. As Skinner nicely puts it, Housman’s Shropshire is that of a Worcestershire man gazing across the border ‘after a lunchtime pint’, rather than that of a Shropshire man familiar with its ‘mechanical nuts and bolts’. Which is to say, you shouldn’t expect to identify every dale and spire from his descriptions.

Listening to Skinner talk about poetry is a bit like sitting next to a philosopher while he talks to himself in a mirror. He ambles, he pauses, he races forth in childish enthusiasm, he hesitates, he corrects himself, he stops. It is difficult to tell whether his ‘I’m not really qualified to talk about this’ approach is wholly genuine or all front (I suspect it may be more the former) but it is endearing. There’s no doubting the depth of his genuine excitement as he reveals that a fragment of Sappho was found in the wrapping of a mummified crocodile.

That Skinner’s is the best podcast on poetry around is, frankly, a crime.