By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Here’s a question for you: which great work did Oscar Wilde write while imprisoned in Reading Gaol? Not The Ballad of Reading Gaol – that was written while he was in exile in France following his release from prison – but De Profundis, his […]
Tag: Literary Criticism
A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Sonnet – To Science’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Sonnet – To Science’ is one of the earliest poems written by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Indeed, this poem was written when Poe was barely 20, in 1829! It appeared in print that year, in Poe’s second collection of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems. […]
A Summary and Analysis of W. B. Yeats’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Divided into six parts, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is, along with ‘Easter 1916’, probably W. B. Yeats’s best-known political poem. It is also among his longer and more ambitious works. In this post, we’ll offer a summary and analysis of the poem, taking it […]
A Summary and Analysis of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (1946) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest later poems. In just sixteen lines and eight couplets, Stevens summons the quiet and calm of solitary reading inside a house. You can read ‘The House Was Quiet […]
Dombey and Son: The Themes of Dickens’s Railway Novel
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the comic genius of Dickens in one of his less well-known novel Dombey and Son is some way from being Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. Indeed, of his fifteen full-length novels, it’s probably down there at the bottom, […]