In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘April is the cruellest month’ – the five words which don’t, strictly speaking, constitute the ‘first line’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as […]
Social media has changed poetry, at least in terms of the sheer number of people who now read poems on a regular basis, or buy poems (Rupi Kaur’s collection Milk and Honey was a runaway bestseller). This has led to fierce debates about what poetry is and what it should […]
Doves are well-known symbols of peace. Although such symbolism is strongly associated with Christianity, the associations between doves and peace go back much further than this: in ancient Mesopotamia, doves were symbols of Inanna-Ishtar, the goddess of love, sexuality, and (perhaps surprisingly) war. Indeed, the ancient Greek word for ‘dove’, […]