The Poetry Appreciation Chat: Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

What's this? The Poetry Appreciation Chat is a (hopefully) weekly series where we pick a poem and discuss it on chat. You can read more about how and why we decided to do it here. You are always welcome to join our discussion in the comments.

This week we decided to go with a Victorian poem, Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1842. We had a great time discussing it (...and Mad Men, and the British Empire and aristocrats in conjunction to it). This series is shaping up to be the most fun thing we do for the blog. You can read the poem here/scroll down and then below you have our conversation about it.

The Poetry Appreciation Chat: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Today we are starting a new series here at the blog. We are not great poetry readers, so we thought to remedy that by turning poetry reading into a conversation, quite literally. How does that work? Each week, we'll pick a poem, read it and then discuss it live on chat. [enter remark about how chat and poetry are really very similar, given that they both rely on a succession of short lines and reveal more about you than you intended them to.] We'll post the poem and the resulting conversation here, and you're welcome to join our discussion in the comments. Hopefully, this will motivate us to read more poetry and get the hang of it in the end.

As fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will have noticed, the title of this series was inspired by a torture device in that book, called the Poetry Appreciation Chair. So do we think poetry is a form of torture? Well, we very much hope it won't be! Here's our very first poem, selected by Alexis, who's read it before (Claudia had not heard of it). You can read it and our thoughts below: