By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ is one of the most famous poems by the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819-92). Across 206 lines of innovative free verse, Whitman offers an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated shortly before Whitman wrote the poem. You can read ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Macbeth’s speech beginning ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …’ is one of the most powerful and affecting moments in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Macbeth speaks these lines just after he has been informed of the death of his wife, Lady Macbeth, who has gone mad before dying (off stage). You can find our fully plot summary of the play here and our analysis of Macbeth here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Literary criticism (or even ‘literary theory’) goes back as far as ancient Greece, and Aristotle’s Poetics. But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from Shakespeare to contemporary literature – being taken seriously.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Unlike many of his other celebrated poems, William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ languished unpublished in notebooks for decades after his death, and was only first published in 1863. In a sense, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ provides a backdrop for the poet’s most famous poetry, and is worth subjecting to close analysis. Here’s the poem first:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is one of the best-known and most widely analysed poems by John Keats (1795-1821); it is also, perhaps, the most famous of his five Odes which he composed in 1819, although ‘To Autumn’ gives it a run for its money. The best way to analyse ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is by going through the poem with a stanza-by-stanza summary; as we go, we’ll offer an analysis of some of the most important features of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.