By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘The Sick Rose’ was published in William Blake’s Songs of Experience in 1794. The poem remains a baffling one, with Blake’s precise meaning difficult to ascertain. Many different interpretations have been offered, so below we sketch out some of the possible ways of analysing ‘The Sick […]
A summary of a classic Wordsworth sonnet ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’. With this opening line, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) begins one of his most famous sonnets. Although he’s best-known in the popular consciousness as the poet who praised daffodils and wandered lonely as a cloud, ‘London, 1802’ […]
An analysis of one of Percy Shelley’s most famous poems by Dr Oliver Tearle Published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818, ‘Ozymandias’ is perhaps Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated and best-known poem. Given its status as a great poem, a few words by way of analysis might help to […]
The life and work of the poet Thomas Chatterton, told through five bits of trivia 1. Chatterton was, in effect, the first English Romantic poet. Before William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Thomas Chatterton (1752-177o) was laying the groundwork for a revolution in English verse. Chatterton was perhaps […]
The life of William Wordsworth told through some intriguing biographical facts William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth in the Lake District. He went to the same school, the Cockermouth Free School, as Fletcher Christian, the man who would lead the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. […]