By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) John Donne’s poetry is a curious mix of contradictions. At once spiritual and metaphysical, it is also deeply embedded in the physicality of bodies: love as a physical, corporeal experience as well as a spiritual high. His style can often be startlingly plain (‘For […]
Tag: Best Poems
10 Classic Poems about Rain Everyone Should Read
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Poets have often been drawn to the harsh weather of wind and rain, either to celebrate it as a force of nature or to lament its ubiquity (at least in the British Isles!). From the opening words of Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales onwards, English […]
10 Edward Thomas Poems Everyone Should Read
The best poems by Edward Thomas (1878-1917) selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Edward Thomas was a master of the short poem. Variously labelled a ‘Georgian poet’ and a ‘war poet‘, he was really a little of both of these, and yet not quite either of them. In a brief flurry of […]
8 Short Poems by Emily Brontë Everyone Should Read
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Although she is best-known for her one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë started out as a poet and left behind some widely anthologised pieces of verse. Below are eight of the shortest and sweetest of the poems she wrote before her untimely death, from tuberculosis, […]