August 2019 – Interesting Literature

10 of the Best Poems about Everyday Life

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The poetry of the everyday has come to the fore in the last century or so. Movements such as imagism and modernism, in particular, helped to make poetry focusing on everyday life and the ordinariness of modern urban living not only possible, but meaningful: in just a few lines, these poems dealing with very normal scenarios manage to contain significance that goes way beyond the ‘ordinary’ and often touches upon the revelatory.

Here’s our pick of ten of the very best poems about everyday life.

Fantasy Book Review: Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a formative early work of fantasy fiction

In the early 1950s, shortly before J. R. R. Tolkien published his landmark novel The Lord of the Rings, the Danish-American author Poul Anderson wrote two short fantasy novels which would have less of an influence on the course of fantasy fiction, but which now read as considerably more ‘modern’, in many ways, than Tolkien’s three-books-in-one epic.

A Short Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Blue and Green’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Blue and Green’ is the collective title of two very short sketches Virginia Woolf included in her 1921 collection of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday. On Tuesday (oddly enough), we offered a short summary of these two sketches; now it’s time to attempt some words of analysis. You can read ‘Blue and Green’ in full by clicking on the link to our summary above.

The Best Poems for September

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

This is the latest in our monthly posts celebrating some of the best poems about each of the months of the year. This time, of course, it’s September’s turn: that point where summer may still linger on, but autumn is beginning to rear its head. The harvest is being gathered, and that ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is upon us, in John Keats’s immortal words. Here’s our pick of the best poems about the month of September.

‘Blue and Green’: A Summary of the Virginia Woolf Short Story

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Blue and Green’ is a pair of short sketches – each only one paragraph in length – which appeared in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection, Monday or Tuesday. These two sketches are less ‘stories’ in the traditional sense than impressionistic prose-poems; nevertheless, below we reproduce both ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, and attempt a short ‘summary’ of each.