‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall’: these famous words begin one of Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologues, ‘My Last Duchess’. But what does Browning mean by having the speaker of his line gesture to his last duchess, or rather the painting of her?
‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ is a well-known proverbial expression which means ‘do not borrow anything from anyone, and don’t lend anyone anything either’. But should such a sentiment be taken seriously? Or should we take the expression, and the sentiment it expresses, with a pinch of the […]
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. But what […]