By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Friendship is such a universal and central theme to all of our lives, that picking just a small number of the best short stories about such a broad theme is always going to be a challenge. However, the following stories are by some of the finest masters of the short story form, and all of them touch upon friendship. Indeed, friendship is the central theme in many of them.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) is not primarily remembered now as a poet, but as the author of Walden (1854), about his time living a few miles from his home in the woods of Massachusetts. But in his poem ‘Friendship’, Thoreau offers a powerful perspective on the relationship between love and friendship.
I think awhile of Love, and while I think,
Love is to me a world,
Sole meat and sweetest drink,
And close connecting link
‘Tween heaven and earth.
I only know it is, not how or why,
My greatest happiness;
However hard I try,
Not if I were to die,
Can I explain.
I fain would ask my friend how it can be,
But when the time arrives,
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Love may be a bigger topic for poets than friendship, but there are nevertheless some classic poems about friends and friendship to be found in English literature. Indeed, in compiling this list it proved tricky to select just 10 great poems about this topic – although the 10 poems included below are, we think, exceptionally fine examples of friendship poems.