By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In a previous post, we’ve gathered together ten of the very best poems about old age, but what about youth and youthfulness? Here’s our pick of ten of the greatest poems in the English language that celebrate or reflect upon youth and being young.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
White is the colour of purity and innocence, death-stricken pallor, and many other associations, including the blank white space of the page the poet attempts to fill with their words. Below, we’ve picked ten of the finest poems about the colour white in some way – whether it’s white flowers, the white moon, or whiteness of some other kind.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Tom Mole’s new book about books … books as physical things, that is
Books, as Stephen King said, are a uniquely portable magic. Or, as Tom Mole puts it in The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Bertram, who becomes Count of Roussillon at the beginning of All’s Well That Ends Well upon the death of his father, is young, and has all of the arrogance that youth can bestow, especially on someone as privileged as he is. The young count might be compared to a number of Shakespeare’s earlier young and naïve male characters, such as Claudio from Much Ado about Nothing (who spurns his beloved, Hero, at the altar because he’s been led to believe she’s been unfaithful).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Previously, we offered five classic poems for boyfriends, aware of the difficulties in trying to pick poems ‘for’ a particular gender over another. Here, we’ve been guided by literary tradition as much as anything: what have (mostly male) poets tended to write about, or for, their female beloveds? What have the great poets throughout history written about their girlfriends?
Here are five poems which, we believe, are ideal for reading to a girlfriend to express all those feelings which are often so hard to put into words oneself: to remind them how beautiful they are, or how much we value them, or how much they are loved.