In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Housman’s poem about the defeat of the Spartans ’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled, And mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the […]
Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on the fairy tale genre was profound. Although ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ have the ring of timeless fairy stories, they were all original tales written by the Danish storyteller in the mid-nineteenth century. First published in […]
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is one of the best-known and most widely analysed poems by John Keats (1795-1821); it is also, perhaps, the most famous of his five Odes which he composed in 1819, although ‘To Autumn’ gives it a run for its money. The best way to analyse […]