In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new study of the unexpected worlds of C. S. Lewis December has always been the month read C. S. Lewis. Perhaps it was growing up reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the land of Narnia being in the grip … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ It’s one of the best-known and most widely quoted utterances from the New Testament, and it appears in a relatively short section of the Bible which is replete with famous utterances. But what does Jesus mean by ‘blessed are … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Autumn is at once symbolic of plenty, ripening, harvest, and abundance; and, at the same time, a symbol of decay, decline, old age, and even death, with associations of things being past their prime. To understand this we need to look at how writers have depicted autumn in poetry … Read more
‘Romanticism is spilt religion’ is a famous phrase from the writings of T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), who has been described as the first modernist poet writing in English and whose prose writings – on modern poetry, politics, and modern art among other things – are among the most important early essays and manifestos for modernism … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ is one of the best-known and most frequently quoted lines from the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), but, like John Donne’s ‘no man is an island’, it doesn’t come from a poem but from a work of prose. But what … Read more
