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.