For Matthew Arnold, ‘Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.’ But Ezra Pound responded that ‘Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.’ Whether poetry is a ‘criticism’ of life, poems about life itself – about the business of living, […]
Prayer has long been a topic for poets, as the following ten classic poems about praying and prayer nicely demonstrate. Ranging over five centuries, these prayer-poems show some of the greatest poets in English getting to grips with prayer as a way of communicating with God, but also with each […]
‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’: so begins one of the most famous and revealing soliloquies in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The words, spoken by Macbeth himself as he considers whether he can go through with the murder of Duncan, appear in […]