By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Words’ was one of the last poems Sylvia Plath wrote before her tragic suicide in February 1963. (Plath would kill herself on 11 February 1963, in a London apartment she had decided to rent because W. B. Yeats had once lived there; ‘Words’ was written on 1 February.)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Glow-worms, shooting stars, and elves: all can be found in ‘The Night Piece: To Julia’, a charming poem by the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick. And that’s just the first three lines! The last line invites a sexual reading, a sign of the thinly-veiled eroticism that pervades Herrick’s Julia poems. (Though here we might add foot-fetishism as well.) Before we offer a few words of analysis of this charming poem, here’s a reminder of it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ sees the titular friar being accosted by some guards one night, and ending up drunkenly telling them – and us – about his whole life. In a poem like ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ one can clearly see why Ezra Pound was influenced by Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, with their plainness of speech and the bluff, no-nonsense manner of Browning’s characters.
Fra Lippo Lippi
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Kendal and Windermere Railway was first proposed in 1844, and opened in 1847. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) opposed the building of a railway in his beloved Lake District, believing it would destroy the beauty of the landscape. Before we offer some words of analysis, here’s a reminder of the poem, ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, which he wrote in opposition to the proposed railway.
On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway
Is then no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown
In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure
As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,
Must perish; – how can they this blight endure?
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reappraises J. G. Ballard’s 1970s masterpiece
‘Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.’ This remark by J. G. Ballard, who has a claim to being one of the most important English writers of the second half of the twentieth century, strikes at the heart of what drives his fiction. And although it’s not his most famous book, for me the remarkable tour de force that is Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island