By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Many famous poets have also been playwrights – consider, for starters, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, T. S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde – and many poets have written about the experience of treading the boards.
Below, we select and introduce some of the best-known and best-loved poems about the subject of acting and the theatre. But have we missed any classics off our list?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Previously, we’ve selected ten classic wedding poems and ten poems to celebrate an engagement. Now, we’re turning our sights on anniversaries, especially romantic anniversaries: wedding anniversaries, anniversaries of first dates, or anniversaries celebrating the day when two lovers or close friends met.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle steps into the yellow wood of a famous American poem
Robert Frost’s two best-known poems both involve a speaker stopping in, or by, a wood: one takes place at the end of the day, in winter (his ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’), while the other, his most famous poem, takes place one morning during autumn. That poem is ‘The Road Not Taken’, which mentions a ‘yellow wood’ within its opening line. But what does that yellow wood symbolise?
Satirical poetry has a long pedigree in English literature, from the verse satires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to contemporary poems satirising modern life. In this post, we select and introduce ten classic satirical poems in English, from the genre known as ‘the verse satire’ to more contemporary examples of poetry which satirises a position, an attitude, or a situation.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Knight’s Tale’ is the first tale told in Geoffrey Chaucer’s long work The Canterbury Tales. Following his introduction in the General Prologue, the Knight proceeds to tell this tale of romantic rivalry between two friends – a story which would later inspire a Shakespeare play (of which more below).