Rhyme and Reason
- Author Mark Forsyth
- Narrator Simon Shepherd
- Publisher W. F. Howes Ltd
- Publish Date 11 December 2025
- Run Time 9 hours and 27 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Literary studies: poetry and poets.
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What to expect
What was it like to be sent a Tudor love sonnet? And how did you reply? What did people think of Wordsworth or Chaucer before they were put on pedestals? What was it like to read poetry back in the days when you didn't have to write an essay on it afterwards?
Rhyme and Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, through Byromania and the Victorian hearth, understanding why people simply enjoyed poetry. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.
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