Traditionally, a ballad was a song that was designed to be danced to, as the etymology of the word, Provençal balada meaning ‘dance, song to dance to’, ultimately from late Latin ballare. The great British ballads – and we say ‘British’ because many of them were Scottish rather than English […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Hope has often been a subject of poetry, as our pick of classic hopeful poems demonstrates. But sometimes the future seems filled less with hope than with fear. What have poets said about fear, about uncertainty for the future, and about being afraid? Below, […]
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of the most technically accomplished poets of the Victorian age. But as well as the sheer range of forms he mastered, there is the daring subject matter he sometimes wrote about. (He was also a colourful figure, known for his saucy private life as […]
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Poets, as Percy Shelley memorably said, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For W. H. Auden, poetry ‘makes nothing happen’. What role does the poet have on the political scene? Have poets engaged memorably with their own political moment?
Poets have written about houses, palaces, museums, towers, churches, and much else besides. Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about buildings and structures of various kinds. From sacred spaces to haunted houses, these buildings feature in some of the finest poems on the subject – but are there […]