Here’s a question for you: which great work did Oscar Wilde write while imprisoned in Reading Gaol? Not The Ballad of Reading Gaol – that was written while he was in exile in France following his release from prison – but De Profundis, his long letter to his former lover, […]
‘Love’s Philosophy’ is a poem by the second-generation Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The poem was published in December 1819 and is one of Shelley’s most accessible short poems. Nevertheless, a few words of analysis may help to illuminate the poem’s meaning. First, though, here’s the text of the […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the comic verse by one of the most ‘miserable’ poets in English literature ‘The Crocodile or, Public Decency’ is not one of the best-known poems of A. E. Housman (1859-1936), the classical scholar and poet who failed his […]