By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 or Robert Browning.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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, when poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced it at court.
Since then, poets have found new ways to use it to say what they want to say – it’s been a love poem, an elegy, a nature poem, an argument, a poem of remembrance, and much else. Here are ten of the finest sonnets in all of English literature, from the sixteenth century to the present day. Follow the title of each poem to read it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 shows how he attained that reputation. Below is the poem, along with an analysis of some of its themes and linguistic features.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 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 Welsh poet, David Rhys Geraint Jones, during the … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 the detective story, for instance), so there are some short poetic gems to be found among Victorian poetry anthologies.
Robert Browning gave us the vast The Ring and the Book but he also gave us the two-line poem included below; Tennyson devoted several thousand lines to his Idylls of the King but also penned the six-line classic ‘The Eagle’. The ten Victorian poems that follow are all no longer than ten lines, and one is only two words long.