By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Hymn to the Evening’ is a poem written by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84) in praise of the evening. Wheatley was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) William Wordsworth’s classic poem beginning ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is famous for its opening line, but it is a poem full of resonant and memorable lines. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most illustrative and important quotations from Wordsworth’s […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Black Snake’ is a 1979 poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who, at the time of her death, was reckoned to be the bestselling poet in the United States. Oliver’s poetry is in the Romantic tradition and often takes its cue […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Funeral Blues’, the title often given to W. H. Auden’s poem that begins ‘Stop all the clocks’, is one of the most famous and universally loved lyric poems on the theme of loss. But this loss is related to a number of other prominent […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’ is one of the shortest stories by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), one of the most original and striking writers of the twentieth century. In reality, the story is not a ‘short story’ in the traditional sense, and […]