By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Many great towns and cities are built on the riverside, since fresh water is one of the basic human necessities. So it’s little surprise that poets have often waxed lyrical about the life-giving properties of rivers and streams. Here are ten of the best river poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘My heart leaps up’, sometimes known as ‘The Rainbow’ is perhaps William Wordsworth’s shortest great poem.
In just nine lines, Wordsworth expresses a number of the several features of Romanticism: a love of nature, the relationship between the natural world and the individual self, and the importance of childhood in making the poet the man he becomes, memorably expressed by Wordsworth’s statement that ‘The child is father of the man’.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the peculiar modernism of an obscure poet
William Empson wrote one of the most influential works of literary criticism of the entire twentieth century. His 1930 book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which put forward seven different ways in which a variety of poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to T. S. Eliot utilise ambiguity in their work and analysed specific examples from the poems, is a masterclass in close reading. What’s all the more remarkable is that Empson completed the book when he was just 23 years old, shortly after he’d been sent down from Cambridge after contraceptives were found in his university rooms. At the time, he was a graduate student working under I. A. Richards. With his expulsion from Cambridge, a promising academic career very nearly came to an end. As it was, it would take Empson over two decades to gain an academic post at a British university.
But as well as writing one of the pioneering works of literary criticism, in which he analysed other poets’ work, William Empson was also a fine poet himself, his work falling somewhere between the obscure high modernism of someone like T. S. Eliot (whose influence on his work Empson readily acknowledged) and the more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Poets have often written about the heart. Whether they’re discussing desire, or being broken-hearted by loss or unrequited love, or the boundless joy they feel in their hearts when encountering the wonders of the natural world. Here are ten of the best poems featuring hearts.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Popular Personage at Home’ was one of two poems Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote about his beloved dog of 13 years, Wessex, who died in 1926, two years before Hardy himself. However, what makes ‘A Popular Personage at Home’ especially notable is that Hardy wrote the poem from the perspective of the dog, allowing ‘Wessex’ to speak for himself.