In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the […]
‘Solid Objects’ is not as well-known or widely studied as some of Virginia Woolf’s other short stories, such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’ or ‘Kew Gardens’, but it is one of the most consummate statements of her modernist aesthetic.
What do you get your beloved for your one-year anniversary? John Donne wrote this poem, ‘The Anniversary’, to his beloved. As well as being a fine love poem, ‘The Anniversary’ is also an example of metaphysical poetry, so it’s worth summarising the content of the poem. And the best way […]
Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night is perhaps the most perfect: the most technically and structurally accomplished, the most unified in terms of its wordplay and themes and characters, and the most profound. Beneath all of the cross-dressing and mistaken identities, Twelfth Night probes some deep truths about the nature […]
On Tuesday, we attempted a ‘summary’ of ‘In the Orchard’, which is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known short stories. But as we observed on Tuesday, it’s one of her most interesting experiments in short fiction because in a sense it’s three versions of the same (very short) story. You […]