By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hart Crane (1899-1932) is a significant American poet of the early twentieth century, though he is often overlooked in our haste to get to Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams or, of the expatriate Americans who settled in Europe, to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yet Hart Crane wrote an epic poem about America which deserves a wide readership, and his life was a curious one – as we hope to demonstrate in this extremely short biography of him.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. We have eleven of Aristophanes’ plays, but he is thought to have written more than forty.
Aristophanes is the earliest comic playwright, or at least the earliest whose work has survived so that we can read it. We are lucky to have The Knights, The Frogs, The Wasps, Lysistrata, Wealth, and the six other Aristophanes plays that have survived beyond antiquity, but in fact we have lost a host of others, including Seasons, Storks, Old Age, Centaur, and Merchant Ships, as well as the promisingly named Frying-Pan Men and Women in Tents. We can only guess at their contents (and how funny they were).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) is often credited with writing the first sonnet sequence in English, and he was certainly the first English poet to write a long cycle of sonnets.
Facts about Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière
1. Molière died shortly after collapsing on stage during one of his own plays. Molière’s play Le malade imaginaire, known in English as The Imaginary Invalid or, alternatively, The Hypochondriac, was first staged in February 1673. Molière acted in the production, taking the lead role of Argan (the hypochondriac of the title). Ironically, given the role he was playing in the production, Molière in fact collapsed in a fit of coughing during the performance. He insisted on finishing his performance, before suffering another massive haemorrhage and dying shortly after. He had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis for several years.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What are the best short love poems in all of English literature? Every poetry-lover’s list is going to be slightly different, of course, but here we’ve tried to find the best romantic poems that don’t outstay their welcome – our ‘rule’ is that the love poem must not be longer than 14 lines, the length of a traditional sonnet.