Birds and their ancestors
The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage meets birds and their relatives, to inspire his new poem.
Will Simon Armitage finally finish his animal poem? In this episode he meets a dodo, a dinosaur, and one of the most remarkable poems ever written about a bird - 'The Windhover' by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
It's the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur - the Megalosaurus - so Simon visits the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to reach back in time - to see if thinking about the ancestors of birds can help him get closer to what it means to be a human animal, writing about other animals in 2024.
Simon also turns to early drafts of Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover' at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, for inspiration
Contributors:
Professor Paul Smith, former director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Rupert Read, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UEA and author of 'Why Climate Breakdown Matters'
Dr Emma Nicholls, Vertebrate Palaeontologist and Collections Manager, Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The fossils featured in this programme are displayed at Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/exhibitions-and-displays
On radio
Broadcast
- Fri 3 Jan 2025 13:45大象传媒 Radio 4