By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Futility’ was one of just five poems by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) that were published before his death, aged 25, on 4 November 1918. Like all of his best-known work it’s a war poem, a brief lyric that focuses on a group of soldiers standing over the dead body of a fallen comrade. Below is Owen’s ‘Futility’ followed by a brief analysis of some of its linguistic features and its imagery.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was an influential poet and thinker in the first few years of the twentieth century. He left behind only a handful of short poems – our pick of which can be read here – but he revolutionised the way English poetry approached issues of rhyme, metre, and imagery. Few before Hulme had thought seriously to liken the moon to a child’s balloon or the ruddy face of a farmer, but Hulme was resolute that poetry, in the hands of the Victorians, had become stale and old, and needed to be reinvented.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Windhover’ was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) in 1877, but, like many of Hopkins’s poems, was not published until 1918, long after his death.
It’s one of his most widely anthologised poems and some analysis of it may help readers to appreciate it as a curious and interesting example of the sonnet form. So, what follows is a very brief analysis of the poem, designed to act as a short introduction to its linguistic power and its themes.