By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One thing which many readers of Robert Frost’s poetry may have wondered while reading his poems is: why does he repeat the same line at the end of his 1923 poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The words ‘things fall apart’ are perhaps most likely to call to mind Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel about life in Nigeria and the collapse of colonialism in West Africa. But if those three small words set off another literary resonance in people’s minds, it’s doubtless going to be W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, which is where the quotation originated.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The line ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’ has been added to the great opening lines of English poetry, taking its place alongside Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, Keats’s ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’, Blake’s ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Let’s begin this week with a nice straightforward poetry question. Which poet gave us the quotation, ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’?
The war poet Wilfred Owen has made these words resonate with new meaning in the last century or so, but we owe the line to a much older, very different poet.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The line ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, with its quartet of infinitives, is one of Tennyson’s most memorable quotations. The line concludes one of his finest dramatic monologues (a literary mode Tennyson, along with his fellow Victorian poet Robert Browning, did much to invent and develop), ‘Ulysses’.