In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle heads off to medieval America and the world of the sagas Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, when he landed on mainland North America, thus sparking the colonisation of the continent by the Europeans. This is the mainstream conception, […]
Secret Library
The Forgotten ‘Pylon Poet’: Stanley Snaith’s Vision of Modernity
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates a neglected voice in modern poetry The ‘Pylon Poets’ was the name given to a group of British poets writing in the 1930s, poets whose work deals with technological modernity. The poem which inspired the name of this […]
Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle gives us a taste of the interesting trivia to be found in his new book… I spent a lot of time looking into treacle earlier this year. Not literally. But, as it were, literarily. You see, there’s more to […]
Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Antwerp’: The First Great Modernist Poem of WWI
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores a modernist war poem by an overlooked writer As it’s Refugee Week, my thoughts have turned to poetry about refugees – such as Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ and the lines from the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More (which may […]
The Argonautica – The Forgotten Classical Epic Poem That Changed Literature
In his latest Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Apollonius of Rhodes’ classic tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece In the world of classical Greek epic poetry, two poems are universally renowned: The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both, of course, are attributed to Homer – whoever […]