Rainbows, like many beautiful natural sights and phenomena, have provided poets with colourful material – quite literally – for centuries. Below, we’ve chosen ten of the very best rainbow poems for your enjoyment. James Thomson, ‘The Rainbow’. ‘Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds / Form, fronting on the sun, thy […]
The best E. E. Cummings poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle E. E. Cummings – or, following the American poet’s own idiosyncratic way of styling himself, ‘e. e. cummings’ – was one of the greatest and most original voices in twentieth-century American poetry. He also wrote some of the most […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews John M. Bowers’ fascinating book about Tolkien’s Chaucerian links If we think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s associations with medieval poetry, it tends to be the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, or perhaps the Middle English narrative poem Sir […]