Close Reading – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Cousin Nancy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Cousin Nancy’ appeared in T. S. Eliot’s first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. It is one of a series of poems included in the volume which satirise and analyse the stuffiness of New England society – in this case, by contrasting the thoroughly ‘modern’ Cousin Nancy with the more traditional attitudes of those around her. You can read ‘Cousin Nancy’ here.

‘Cousin Nancy’ describes the young woman of the title. There we come to our first problem. What evidence is there that she is young? Well, she is ‘Miss Nancy Ellicott’, but middle-aged and elderly women can be unmarried, too. Or is it the fact that her aunts are mentioned, thus making her seem younger? Or the fact that she is described doing very active things – striding across the New England hills, riding a horse across the hills, dancing the ‘modern dances’? A combination of these things, it would seem.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Self’s the Man’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Self’s the Man’ was completed in November 1958, and was published in Philip Larkin’s third major poetry collection, The Whitsun Weddings, in 1964. In some ways it might be regarded as the lighter precursor to a more elusive later poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, which we’ve analysed here. But the present post constitutes some notes towards an analysis of ‘Self’s the Man’.

A Short Analysis of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

There was a time when every schoolchild could quote lines from Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, since it was a popular poem to be taught, learnt by rote, and analysed in schools in Britain.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Essential Beauty’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Essential Beauty’ (1962) is one of several poems Philip Larkin wrote about the gulf between advertising and the real world. Like another poem he wrote in 1962, ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, ‘Essential Beauty’ examines the promises that billboard advertisements make to us and how starkly the reality of people’s lives differs from such aspirational messages. You can read ‘Essential Beauty’ here.

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Cask of Amontillado’ is one of Poe’s shorter classic tales. It was first published in 1846 in a women’s magazine named Godey’s Lady’s Book, a hugely popular magazine in the US in the mid-nineteenth century. (The magazine had published one of Poe’s earliest stories, ‘The Visionary’, twelve years earlier.)