‘The Future never spoke –’: with these simple four words, Emily Dickinson begins one of her finest meditations on the unknowability of the future. Although ‘The Future never spoke’ does not present the challenges some of Dickinson’s more formidably cryptic poems pose, some words of analysis may nevertheless prove helpful. […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry It’s a sobering thought that all of the Anglo-Saxon poetry that has survived is found in just four manuscripts which escaped the ravages of time, the pillaging of the Vikings, and the […]
To attempt an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a single blog post: surely a foolhardy objective if ever there was one. So here we’ll try to focus on some of the key points of Hamlet and analyse their significance, homing in on some of the most interesting as well as […]