‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is, after ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost’s best-known and best-loved poem. (Frost himself called it ‘my best bid for remembrance’.) It seems a rather straightforward poem, but, as with that other Frost poem, its simplicity is only on the surface, and is […]
Theodore Adorno famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. The idea that the atrocities of the Holocaust can be responded to through art – and especially the idea that words can be found to respond to such horrific events – has persisted in the popular mind. And […]
‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’: so begins probably the most famous speech from Richard II, William Shakespeare’s 1590s history play about the fall of the Plantagenet king. These words are spoken by the dying John of Gaunt, and the phrases he uses – from ‘this royal throne […]