Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Say ‘medieval literature’ and a few names will spring to mind: Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, the anonymous author of Beowulf. But where does one start exploring the wonderful and colourful world of medieval writing? Here are our ten recommendations, which give a sense of the rich panoply of medieval literature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Victorians often liked their poems much the way they liked their novels: the bigger the better. And yet, just as there are some great Victorian short stories (they helped to pioneer the ghost story and the detective story, for instance), so there are some short poetic gems to be found among Victorian poetry anthologies.
Robert Browning gave us the vast The Ring and the Book but he also gave us the two-line poem included below; Tennyson devoted several thousand lines to his Idylls of the King but also penned the six-line classic ‘The Eagle’. The ten Victorian poems that follow are all no longer than ten lines, and one is only two words long.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Robert Burns (1759-1796) wrote many classic poems and songs, so whittling down his complete works to just ten recommendations has been hard. Nonetheless, there are a few poems that simply have to be on any list of Burns’s best poems, so we hope that most of our choices here won’t seem too perverse or controversial.
But which is Robert Burns’s finest poem? We’ve presented the selection below in order, concluding with what we think is Burns’s best poem, but really there were a good four or five that could’ve taken the top spot