‘Requiescat’ is a poem by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who was better known as a playwright than a poet – indeed, better known as a novelist, a short-story writer, even for being Oscar Wilde than he ever was for his poetry. Yet Wilde had won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for […]
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is, after ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost’s best-known and best-loved poem. (Frost himself called it ‘my best bid for remembrance’.) It seems a rather straightforward poem, but, as with that other Frost poem, its simplicity is only on the surface, and is […]
‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’: so begins probably the most famous speech from Richard II, William Shakespeare’s 1590s history play about the fall of the Plantagenet king. These words are spoken by the dying John of Gaunt, and the phrases he uses – from ‘this royal throne […]