By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Brontë sisters are best-known as novelists: Emily gave us Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte offered Jane Eyre. But from a very young age, before they penned some of the greatest novels of the Victorian era, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell – the names they adopted as their pseudonyms – were poets.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most popular and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Longfellow (1807-82) is best-known for The Song of Hiawatha, and for growing a beard to hide the marks of a family tragedy, but he also wrote many other celebrated poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ever since Homer composed his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, poetry has been concerned with heroes and heroism. Sometimes it’s extolled the virtues of bravery and heroics, while at other times poets have held our ideas and ideals of ‘heroism’ and ‘heroes’ up for more critical scrutiny. Below is a selection of both kinds.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’, begins William Shakespeare in sonnet 144. Although this sonnet appears in the section of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence that is principally concerned with the ‘Dark Lady’, sonnet 144 is noteworthy for discussing both the Fair Youth (from earlier in the sequence) and the Dark Lady side by side, comparing the two.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Many poems deal with the visual: with things seen and observed. There are also some fine poems about sounds, and things we hear, whether it’s a voice, a footstep, or the sound of rain pattering upon a roof. But what about touch, arguably the most intimate and sensual of all of the senses?
Poets have often written powerfully about touching, whether it’s the tender touch of a lover or the palpable and tangible world of nature. Here are six of the very best poems about touch and touching.