By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ was written in 1916, while Thomas was fighting in the trenches. ‘Rain’ is about Thomas’s experience of sitting in a hut all night alone, listening to the rain falling and meditating on his death and on the fates of his fellow soldiers in the First World War.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Not Waving but Drowning’ is the best-known poem by Stevie Smith (1902-71). In 1995, it was voted Britain’s fourth favourite poem in a poll. First published in 1957, the poem fuses comedy and tragedy, moving between childlike simplicity and darker, more cynical touches.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most perennially popular and widely studied plays. Its story of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, whose love for each other is doomed from the start because they belong to rival families in the Italian city of Verona, is one of the most famous love stories in world literature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
If, as the old quip has it, Hamlet is a great play but it has too many quotations in it, a similar charge might be laid against Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. So many lines in the play have become proverbial and are often quoted outside of the context of the play itself.
But what are the most famous quotations from Macbeth, and what do they mean? Let’s look at some of the most important quotations found in this short tragedy.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury is among the most famous and iconic speeches in English history. On 9 August 1588, Elizabeth addressed the land forces which had been mobilised at the port of Tilbury in Essex, in preparation for the expected invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.