By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘My heart leaps up’, sometimes known as ‘The Rainbow’ is perhaps William Wordsworth’s shortest great poem.
In just nine lines, Wordsworth expresses a number of the several features of Romanticism: a love of nature, the relationship between the natural world and the individual self, and the importance of childhood in making the poet the man he becomes, memorably expressed by Wordsworth’s statement that ‘The child is father of the man’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Many of William Blake’s greatest poems are written in clear and simple language, using the quatrain form which faintly summons the ballad metre used in popular oral poetry. But some of his poetry, being allegorical and symbolic in nature, requires some careful close reading and textual analysis. ‘The Garden of Love’ is one such example. What is this poem about?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’ is one of William Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, which he first published in the 1800 reprint of his landmark volume Lyrical Ballads (co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge). In three quatrains, Wordsworth summarises the life, beauty, and death of Lucy, a ‘Maid’ who lived and died among Wordsworth’s beloved Lake District. Before we offer a few words of analysis of this poem, here’s a reminder of it.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
For the critic Geoffrey Durrant, the three stanzas of ‘She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’ represent ‘Lucy’s growth, perfection, and death’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Kubla Khan’ is perhaps the most famous unfinished poem in all of English literature. But why the poem remained unfinished, and how Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to write it in the first place, are issues plagued by misconception and misunderstanding. How should we analyse this classic poem by one of the pioneers of English Romanticism?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Percy Shelley (1792-1822) wrote a considerable amount of poetry in his short life, as well as penning pamphlets such as The Necessity of Atheism (which got him expelled from Oxford) and ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (which contains his famous declaration that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’). But which are Shelley’s very best poems. Undoubtedly, a number of poems immediately spring to mind. Below are what we consider to be Shelley’s ‘top ten’. What’s your favourite Shelley poem?