Dr Oliver Tearle’s commentary on ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold ‘Dover Beach’ is one of the best-known and best-loved of Victorian poems, and the most widely anthologised poem by a Victorian figure whose poetic output was considerably slimmer than that of many of his contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson […]
10 of the best sonnets in the English language, selected by Dr Oliver Tearle The sonnet form has been used by many poets in many languages since it was invented in the Middle Ages. It really arrived in English literature during the reign of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, […]
An introduction to ‘God’s Grandeur’, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, by Dr Oliver Tearle In our pick of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best poems, we included ‘God’s Grandeur’, a sonnet celebrating ‘the grandeur of God’. Hopkins was one of the greatest religious poets of the entire nineteenth century, and this poem […]
A moving poem by a largely forgotten WWII poet In the latest post for our occasional series on neglected poems (see Anna Seward’s brilliant poem ‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’ for a previous title in the series), we thought we’d share with you this little-known poem written by a young […]
The best and the shortest of Victorian poems – from Tennyson to Charlotte Brontë The Victorians often liked their poems much the way they liked their novels: the bigger the better. And yet, just as there are some great Victorian short stories (they helped to pioneer the ghost story and […]