By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Poetry and Valentine’s Day are intrinsically linked, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the long-standing tradition of ‘roses are red, violets are blue’ poems, which people often write for their beloved on 14th February.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Not Waving but Drowning’ is the best-known poem by Stevie Smith (1902-71). In 1995, it was voted Britain’s fourth favourite poem in a poll. First published in 1957, the poem fuses comedy and tragedy, moving between childlike simplicity and darker, more cynical touches.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ is a 1974 short story by the British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009). Ballard’s unique contribution to literature was to take the trappings of science fiction – space travel, new technologies, and the rest of it – and apply it to spaces and concerns closer to home. This story is a classic example.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) is widely seen as the progenitor of the literary movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, along with Langston Hughes, McKay is perhaps the poet who did more than any other to raise the profile of this group of African American writers, artists, and musicians working in New York in the 1920s.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Colossus’ is a transitional Sylvia Plath poem. The title poem of the only poetry collection published during her lifetime (The Colossus, in 1960), it is one of the most accomplished poems in that collection, and in some ways paves the way for the mature poems, written in Plath’s distinctive voice, which she wrote from 1960 onwards.
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