This month I met with Susanne Wofford, professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, to talk through the April eclogue. We travelled through a myriad of classical and mythological echoes, and at least one epiphany, to the culminating question of this project: how do we think about the relation between pastoral and epic? Susanne’s answer is excitingly different from the one you may expect. This is the final episode of the podcast as I’ve recorded them, and since it is to Susanne above all that I owe my fascination with The Shepheardes Calender, and my sense of its innumerable possibilities as a site of conversation, there could be no more fitting way to end it. It is also, delightfully, not the end, since the moment I press ‘publish’ we have achieved the circularity that Spenser deploys so cannily in his calender.
One of my companions in an idyllic graduate seminar called ‘The Ethics of Pastoral’, taught in 2015 by Professors Susanne Wofford and Jane Tylus, was Dr Tanya Schmidt-Morstein, who went on, like me, to take Susanne’s class on The Faerie Queene, and to complete her PhD under Susanne’s supervision. Reunited by the Boston conferences, Tanya and I decided to go on an adventure to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, one of the most famous art collections in the U.S. Here we found two paintings of Isabella herself, which caused us to reflect on another presiding theme of the April eclogue: female power and its pictorial, and perhaps pastoral, representation.
Since it isn’t too long, this episode opens with a recording of the entire April eclogue, read by me and Susanne. In the conversation that follows we often refer to Spenser’s epic-romance poem, The Faerie Queene. I apologise if any of these references are mysterious. Here is a link to the part of the poem that we talked about the most—Book VI, Canto x—known as ‘the dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale’. I hope that you may be inspired to read Spenser’s epic-romance next, if you haven’t already.
At the beginning of May 2024, the month in which I started this project, I was at Tampere University in Finland, where a group of around 40 of us read the entire of Spenser’s Faerie Queene aloud over the course of three long days. On April 5th 2025, this month, Verity Spott and I, acting as the Hollingdean Poetry Group, organised a marathon reading of the whole of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in the Hollingdean Community Center, at the top of a hill overlooking the downs in East Brighton. There was laughter, and shaking of heads, and, thanks to Anna and Katya Schwarz, amazing food. This podcast has stretched between the two events, so it feels like a continuation of the impulse to gather in poetry, to experience the mutual excitement, thoughtfulness, mystery, frustration and companionship of that gathering.
Have no doubt that other occasions will be found, and stay subscribed to find out what they will be! It remains for me to thank the International Spenser Society and the huge group of people—interlocutors, collaborators, listeners—who have made this podcast possible.
And thank you to Tanya Schmidt-Morstein for adventuring with me, to Susanne Wofford for leading the dance, to artist Noonie Minogue for interpreting the woodcut, to N.L. Chaundler (I can’t fathom why I swapped your ‘L’ for an ‘H’ in this episode) for accompanying us all this way with mesmerising poetic reflections, to Ella Mahony for designing the wonderful goat picture, and to Femi Oriogun-Williams for mixing and mastering so many episodes, as well as creating the theme music.
