Secret Library – Page 9 – Interesting Literature

The Meaning and Origin of ‘April is the Cruellest Month’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s famous opening words to his greatest poem

‘April is the cruellest month’ is the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. There are, actually, two things I could say in response to the statement I’ve just typed. One of them is that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the opening line of The Waste Land (all will be explained in a moment).

The Meaning and Origin of the Phrase ‘All That Glitters Is Not Gold’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning – and literary origins – of a well-known phrase

‘All that glitters is not gold’. Who gave us that famous expression? William Shakespeare? Thomas Gray? That prolific but elusive author, ‘Anon’?

Who Said ‘Better to Have Loved and Lost than Never to Have Loved at All’?

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and origin of a well-known proverb

‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ It’s become a proverb, and proverbs are, usually, authorless.

The Forgotten Futurist: Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses ‘Songs to Joannes’, a little-known work of avant-garde modernist poetry

Modernist poetry, at least as it’s usually taught on university survey courses and as it’s fixed in the popular imagination, is something of a closed shop: not just because of its perceived elitism (although, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, this can be overstated), but because modernist poets writing in English (whether in the US or in Britain) tend to be configured as a small group of Chosen Ones.

We have T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and perhaps some of the UK-based imagists (H. D., Richard Aldington); over in the US, there are William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The modernist ‘canon’ is more of a cannonette.

The Mysterious Origins of the Word ‘Posh’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the obscure and mysterious history of a now ubiquitous word

If you’re sitting comfortably, how about a quick round of the Interesting Literature Friday Night Quiz of Doom? Well, all right, just a single quiz question. Ready?