A reading of Poe’s short horror story ‘The Black Cat’ was first published in August 1843 in the Saturday Evening Post. It’s one of Poe’s shorter stories and one of his most disturbing, focusing on cruelty towards animals, murder, and guilt, and told by an unreliable narrator who’s rather difficult […]
Dr Oliver Tearle’s summary of a fine Blake poem ‘Spring’ is not one of William Blake’s most famous poems. The poem was first published in Blake’s 1789 collection Songs of Innocence. It’s a glorious celebration of the arrival of spring, exploring the harmony of man with the natural world and […]
The interesting origins of a curious word The most widely known and widely used meaning of the word ‘muggle’ is probably the one that J. K. Rowling invented for her Harry Potter series of books: namely, a person who does not possess magical skills. Normally written with a capital M, […]
The origins of a blatantly curious word The meaning of the word ‘blatant’ is, one suspects, blatantly obvious. But how it arrived at its modern meaning is not. The word has a curious history within the world of English poetry, and ‘blatant’ took its time to arrive at its modern […]
The interesting origins of an elusive word Here’s a question for you: what does the word ‘tuffet’ mean? Can you picture or describe one? The word ‘tuffet’ should be easy enough to define. Its origins, similarly, should be fairly straightforward when we look into it. How about we make it […]