Say ‘fox and hedgehog’ and one is likely to think of several things. There is the old proverb, attributed to many people throughout history, that ‘the fox knows many things; the hedgehog, one big thing’. And, building on this idea, there is the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog […]
‘Mirror’: not the most famous of Sylvia Plath’s poem titles, perhaps, but a fine example of her ability to inhabit some other person, character, or – as here – object, and imbue it with a clear, commanding voice which reveals things about us, and what it is to be human. […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the remarkable modernist poem, Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees ‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 […]