William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) If Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the old quip has it, has too many quotations in it, his Julius Caesar cannot be far behind. A whole host of now familiar quotations and expressions – many of which now have the ring of traditional proverbs, with others […]
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-72), who was the first poet, male or female, from America to have a book of poems published: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America appeared in 1650. Although she had been born in England in 1612, by the 1660s Bradstreet was living in Andover, Massachusetts. […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Nineteen Eighty-Four is the best-known work of George Orwell (1903-50), who, as well as writing two of the most enduring novels of the 1940s, was also one of the greatest essayists of the first half of the twentieth century. Orwell’s dystopian vision of a […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most perennially popular and widely studied plays. Its story of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, whose love for each other is doomed from the start because they belong to rival families in the Italian city of Verona, is one of […]