By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Pied Beauty’ belongs to the middle period of the poetic career of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), that period when he had found his distinctive poetic voice but before he became plagued by depression later in his short life. The poem reflects this: ‘Pied Beauty’ is written by a poet … Read more
Interesting Arthur Miller trivia 1. Arthur Miller’s father lost virtually everything in the 1929 Wall Street crash. Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949) was informed by personal experience: in 1929, when Miller was still a boy, his father Isidore lost much of his fortune in the famous stock-market crash of 1929. His father had … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ may well qualify for the accolade of ‘most baffling poem of the entire twentieth century’. Written by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and published in his 1923 volume Harmonium, the poem is reproduced below, along with a brief analysis of the poem’s meaning and language.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Dawn, morning, sunrise: these are perennial themes of English poetry. From beautiful aubades to morning prayers, English literature is ready to rouse us from slumber with cheering, inspiring, moving, and thought-provoking poems about the dawn. So let’s rise and shine with some of English literature’s best poems about the … Read more
The best poems about Fall (or autumn) selected by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’: so begins W. H. Auden’s ‘Autumn Song’, which features below in this compilation of ten of the best autumn poems in all of English literature. The following classic autumnal poems (or, to our readers in the US, … Read more
