‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’, begins William Shakespeare in sonnet 144. Although this sonnet appears in the section of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence that is principally concerned with the ‘Dark Lady’, sonnet 144 is noteworthy for discussing both the Fair Youth (from earlier in the sequence) and the […]
Many poems deal with the visual: with things seen and observed. There are also some fine poems about sounds, and things we hear, whether it’s a voice, a footstep, or the sound of rain pattering upon a roof. But what about touch, arguably the most intimate and sensual of all […]
The twentieth century gave us modernism, postmodernism, and greater prominence to marginalised voices largely absent from the poetic canon in earlier periods of literary history. Below, we’ve selected ten of the greatest and most representative poems of the twentieth century, to act as a sort of introduction to a busy […]