Poets often find themselves backed into a corner when writing more traditional rhyming poetry. They find they’ve ended a line with the unpromising word ‘orange’ and now have to try to find a word that rhymes with it, or else change the offending word for something more rhyme-friendly. But ‘world’ […]
Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, also known as The Defence of Poesy, was written in 1579-80). It has at least one great claim to fame: it’s the first work of ‘literary criticism’ in English. Sidney’s essay is an ‘apology’ for, or defence of, the art of poetry, but […]
Contrary to popular belief, T. S. Eliot did not come up with the phrase ‘objective correlative’. However, he did co-opt that expression to describe one of his most famous and influential theories of literature, specifically in relation to Shakespeare’s work. What did Eliot mean by ‘objective correlative’?