Michelle A. Taylor on Patricia Lockwood ("The Ode on Grecian Urn")

Close Readings

What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn").

Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Michelle is a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures, College Literature, Modernism/ modernity Print+, Literary Imagination, and Modernist Archives: A Handbook, and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point, Post45 Contemporaries, The Fence, Poetry Foundation, the Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

If you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get the occasional update on the pod and on my other work.