Biography – Interesting Literature

The Green Knight: The Life and Work of the Poet George Gascoigne

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the remarkable achievements of the greatest Elizabethan poet nobody reads

George Gascoigne wrote the first original poem in blank verse, the first prose comedy, and arguably the first English novel. He wrote the first treatise on prosody (the study of versification) in English. He was also the author of the first major sonnet sequence in English; he, not Sir Philip Sidney, should get that credit. The twentieth-century critic Yvor Winters considered George Gascoigne to be one of the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the entire sixteenth century. But who was George Gascoigne? Given this roll-call of achievements, why do so few people know his name?

A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s ‘Rock Me to Sleep’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen (1832-1911) was an American author and poet whose 1859 poem, ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother’ (the ‘mother’ word is sometimes omitted) is still relatively well-known, thanks to the opening lines: ‘Backward, turn backward, O time, in thy flight; / Make me a child again, just for to-night.’ Here is the poem in full:

Rock Me to Sleep

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;—
Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears,—
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,—

Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: Criticism on Principle

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Dr Johnson’s witty and penetrating critical biographies of the great and good

By 1779, Samuel Johnson had attained that title by which he would become familiarly known: ‘Dr Johnson’. He wasn’t ‘doctored’ when he completed his most defining work (‘defining’ in every sense), the Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755.

But when he came to write his Lives of the Poets, just five years before his death, he had become the era’s most celebrated man of letters, with an annual pension from the state to honour his services to scholarship and literature, and a reputation – and, indeed, a celebrity status – that continues to dwarf that of all other eighteenth-century writers. Who can picture Henry Fielding, or envisage Samuel Richardson? But Johnson, with his one-line pronouncements on everything from London to literature, death to dictionaries, remains remarkably alive to us.

Five Fascinating Facts about William Gibson

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. William Gibson popularised the term ‘cyberspace’ in a short story of 1982.

Defined as ‘the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs’, cyberspace first appeared in fiction in William Gibson’s 1982 story ‘Burning Chrome’ (no relation to Google Chrome, we’re told), a story about a couple of freelance hackers. (Before it was published, Gibson read this story out at a science fiction convention – to an audience of four people.)

Five Fascinating Facts about Plutarch

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Plutarch effectively invented the genre of biography.

Plutarch’s innovative approach to biography was to take two important figures – one from Greek civilisation and the other from the Roman empire – and compare and contrast their characters, fortunes, and outlooks. This is the basis for his most famous work, the Parallel Lives.