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 […]
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The Curious Symbolism of Autumn in Literature and Myth
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 […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘Poets Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World’
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 […]
The Meaning of Hulme’s ‘Romanticism is Spilt Religion’
‘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 […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Hundred’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.’ Or, to be precise and observe the line break: ‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.’ This is one of several famous quotations which originated in the 1854 poem ‘The Charge of […]