Secret Library – Interesting Literature

Book Review: John Plotz on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews John Plotz’s personal reading of a fantasy classic by Ursula K. Le Guin

The American author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is widely regarded as one of the finest authors of what is broadly termed ‘speculative fiction’. During the course of her long writing career, she wrote novels and short stories in both the fantasy and science-fiction genres. She has also long been praised as one of the greatest stylists within these genres, with an ability to pick up, as Chesterton said of Robert Louis Stevenson, the right word on the end of her pen.

Book Review: Rooms of Their Own

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a book about the rooms in which great writers worked

‘Writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people, making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.’

So wrote Virginia Woolf in Great Men’s Houses (1911), several years before she would transform the humble room into a space of daydreaming, reverie, and imagination in her famous short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, and almost two decades before she would give the series of Cambridge lectures which inspired the title of both her best-known work of non-fiction and, with a slight change, the title of Alex Johnson’s Rooms of Their Own.

The Meaning of the ‘Yellow Wood’ in Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle steps into the yellow wood of a famous American poem

Robert Frost’s two best-known poems both involve a speaker stopping in, or by, a wood: one takes place at the end of the day, in winter (his ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’), while the other, his most famous poem, takes place one morning during autumn. That poem is ‘The Road Not Taken’, which mentions a ‘yellow wood’ within its opening line. But what does that yellow wood symbolise?

The Curious Symbolism of Roses in Literature and Myth

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the symbolism of that perennially popular flower, the rose

Roses are sometimes known as the queen of flowers, and they are perhaps the richest in symbolism, whether in Christianity, classical myth, or modern (especially romantic) literature. But the symbolism of roses is a curious topic, because red and white roses have attracted such starkly different connotations.

The Meaning and Origin of ‘Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the meaning of Auden’s famous statement

‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ This statement, made by W. H. Auden in his 1939 poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, has provoked plenty of commentary since Auden’s poem was published. But what did Auden mean when he asserted that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’? Did he really believe such a thing?