A summary of one of Christina Rossetti’s most famous poems – written by Dr Oliver Tearle Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was still in her mid-twenties when she wrote this classic sonnet about male art and the way it uses and depicts women. ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ is a widely (and rightly) […]
A summary of a remarkable short poetry fragment by John Keats ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ is an oddity amongst John Keats’s poetry – indeed, amongst Romantic poetry in general. Just eight lines long – or seven-and-a-half, even – it’s almost a fragment, written in blank verse, almost […]
A brief overview and summary of Confessio Amantis, John Gower’s medieval poem The most famous English poem of the entire fourteenth century is Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales, a vast collection of stories borrowed from European medieval and classical sources. But there is another English poem from the fourteenth century, which […]
A brief introduction to a powerful short WWI poem by Isaac Rosenberg According to Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg was one of the three poets of significance who died during the First World War. Although his reputation has been overshadowed by Wilfred Owen (who died in 1918, the same year as […]
‘So careful of the type?’ A brief summary of Tennyson’s In Memoriam LVI The so-called ‘dinosaur cantos’ or ‘dinosaur sections’ from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long poem In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) are among the most popular cantos from this elegy for Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, who had died suddenly in 1833. […]