By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to support each other to bring about social change. The poem also cleverly summons the work of earlier poets who had written on the same topic.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’ – or, more accurately, ‘Do not stand by my grave and weep’ – are the opening words of a much-loved poem whose official title is ‘Immortality’. The poem was written by the American poet Clare Harner (1909-77) and published in The Gypsy magazine in December 1934. (We’ll return to the matter of the poem’s authorship towards the end of this article.)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), or H. D. as she chose to publish, was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’ by various critics and reviewers. Born in the United States, H. D. made her literary name in London, where she was at the centre of the short-lived imagist movement during the First World War.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. The poem, which uses a very specific verse form, describes a grandmother and a child as they sit in a kitchen together, with a mysterious and unspecific air of grief or sadness haunting them both.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Much Madness Is Divinest Sense’ is the unofficial title of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems (she tended not to give her poems titles: they’re simply numbered in her Complete Poems, and this one is number 620).