A reading of a short Eliot poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘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 […]
A reading of a Larkin poem ‘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’, […]
A summary of a classic poem 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. Gray’s poem gave Thomas Hardy the […]
A reading of a classic poem about advertising ‘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 […]
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 […]