By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘If I Could Tell You’ is a poem by the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907-73), who was born in York and made his name as the foremost English poet of the 1930s, before emigrating to the United States (where he would live on and off for much of the rest of his life) towards the end of the decade.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
It’s a common trope that poets often die young, although for every poet who didn’t live to see their thirtieth year, we could name many more who lived to a ripe old age: William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Frost. Nevertheless, the idea of the poet is frequently bound up in the popular consciousness with an early death. Below, we introduce ten of the youngest poets to die before their time. All of the following poets died in their twenties or early thirties, and one died even before reaching the age of 18.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Published in his collection West Running Brook in 1928, ‘Tree at My Window’ is one of Robert Frost’s finest poems. In just sixteen lines, Frost explores the relationship between man and nature, and provides a slightly different take on this relationship from that seen in the work of earlier, Romantic poets. You can read ‘Tree at My Window’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle salutes the lost modernist, David Jones
Which poem is being described here? Published in 1952, this long modernist poem might be described as a modern ‘epic’ poem. It is highly allusive, drawing on, among others, Arthurian legend, Jessie Weston’s 1920 book From Ritual to Romance, and the opening words of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Instinct of Hope’ is a poem by the English Romantic poet John Clare (1793-1864). ‘The Instinct of Hope’ is a sonnet (of sorts), which … well, we’ve already hit upon a curious problem. Is this poem a sonnet or not? Below we offer some words of analysis, but first, here’s the text of the poem.
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