In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of the story of the Trojan Horse If you had to name the famous work from classical antiquity which told the story of the Trojan Horse, which work would you name? The work of literature which […]
What is ‘metaphysical poetry’, and who were the metaphysical poets? The term – which was popularised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, is often used to describe the work of poets including John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, although Johnson originally applied it to the poetry of Abraham […]
The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet […]