In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry ‘The Seafarer’ is one of the earliest poems in English literature. Its ‘plot’ can be summarised easily enough: an elderly sailor speaks to us about his alienation from the world. The 124-line […]
‘Requiescat’ is a poem by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who was better known as a playwright than a poet – indeed, better known as a novelist, a short-story writer, even for being Oscar Wilde than he ever was for his poetry. Yet Wilde had won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for […]
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is, after ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost’s best-known and best-loved poem. (Frost himself called it ‘my best bid for remembrance’.) It seems a rather straightforward poem, but, as with that other Frost poem, its simplicity is only on the surface, and is […]