If one were to compile a list of the most outrageous, scandalous, and provocative poets in all of English literature, one name would have to lead all the rest: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-80). His colourful private (and public) life at the court of King Charles II was […]
‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (1946) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest later poems. In just sixteen lines and eight couplets, Stevens summons the quiet and calm of solitary reading inside a house. You can read ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ here […]
‘The Imp of the Perverse’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1845. Of all of Poe’s stories, this is one of the strongest tales to prefigure the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Before we proceed to a summary and analysis of this […]