By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The twentieth century gave us modernism, postmodernism, and greater prominence to marginalised voices largely absent from the poetic canon in earlier periods of literary history.
Starry Lite: Isaac Asimov’s Space Ranger
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the first novel in Isaac Asimov’s juvenile science fiction series
Science fiction set in our own solar system arguably began with Lucian, the classical author whose short satirical piece True History paved the way for later planetary adventures using Mars, Venus, the Moon, and various other locations as the backdrop for almighty battles, fearsome imaginary monsters, and numerous ‘there and back again’ narratives. In the Victorian era, George Griffith, the contemporary of the far more famous and enduring H. G. Wells, wrote his Stories of Other Worlds, starring a newlywed couple who choose to spend their honeymoon travelling around Earth’s neighbouring planets.
The Best Nineteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In Britain, nineteenth-century poetry began with Romanticism and ended in Decadence, with the high Victorian poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti coming in the middle. In the United States, meanwhile, Longfellow, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson helped to shape the course of nineteenth-century American poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most representative poems of the nineteenth century written in English, whether in Britain or America.
The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The eighteenth century was the great Age of Enlightenment, but also Romanticism. The Augustan or neoclassical poetry of Alexander Pope and others eventually gave way to the Romantic meditations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most emblematic poems of the eighteenth century. We’ve confined ourselves to poems written in the English language here, to make the task even vaguely achievable.
The Best Seventeenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The seventeenth century gave us the first published poems from America, the elaborate conceits and scientific flavour of metaphysical poetry, some classic English epic poems, and the birth of the new, orderly, ‘neoclassical’ poetry that would continue into the following century. Below, we select ten of the most emblematic – and greatest – seventeenth-century poems, and offer a brief introduction to each.