By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was a fascinating man and poet, and his poetry remains much-loved and widely read around the world. But which are his very best poems? In this post, we’ve endeavoured to choose Dylan Thomas’s ten finest poems which we think everyone should read.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘They Shut Me up in Prose’, whilst not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems – it certainly isn’t up there with ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, or ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ – is nevertheless sometimes anthologised, and occasionally quoted for its suggestive opening line.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Moonrise’ is subtitled ‘June 19 1876’. It’s not one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known poems, and may have been left in fragment form; alternatively, it can be read as a short complete poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the first person in America, male or female, to have a volume of poems published. A fascinating figure, she herself wasn’t American and had been born in England, but she was among a group of early English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1630s.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Clock stopped’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, but it uses its central metaphor to explore one of the most salient themes of her poetry: death. Dickinson uses the image of the stopped clock to reflect on the ending of a life and what this means.