In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the remarkable modernist poem, Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees ‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 […]
Previously we’ve offered ten of the best poems for husbands, so now it’s the other spouse’s turn. Here are ten of the greatest poems about wives, poems for wives, or poems which otherwise concern uxoriousness (love of one’s wife). Anonymous, ‘The Wife’s Lament’. This Anglo-Saxon poem, preserved in the Exeter […]
‘Telegraph Wires’ belongs to Ted Hughes’s middle-late period, before the publication of Birthday Letters shortly before his death in 1998 but after his classic earlier work such as ‘The Thought-Fox’, Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’, and, of course, Crow. Published in 1989 in his collection Wolfwatching, ‘Telegraph Wires’ requires some close textual analysis […]