Rainbows, like many beautiful natural sights and phenomena, have provided poets with colourful material – quite literally – for centuries. Below, we’ve chosen ten of the very best rainbow poems for your enjoyment. James Thomson, ‘The Rainbow’. ‘Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds / Form, fronting on the sun, thy […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews John M. Bowers’ fascinating book about Tolkien’s Chaucerian links If we think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s associations with medieval poetry, it tends to be the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, or perhaps the Middle English narrative poem Sir […]
Is Timon a sympathetic character or not? Is he, in Harold Bloom’s words in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, a ‘defrauded idealist’ or a ‘gullible fool’? Is he a kind man whose generosity is taken advantage of, who then slides into understandable misanthropy when he finds that others will […]