By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is perhaps the most famous statement John Keats ever wrote. But what do these words mean? They form part of the concluding couplet to his poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, perhaps the most famous of his five Odes which he composed in 1819, which was something of an annus mirabilis for Keats’s creativity:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Dated ‘Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824’, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’ is a poem Lord Byron wrote on his 36th birthday, less than three months before he died. Byron was at Missolonghi, in Greece, fighting with the Greeks in their war for independence. It’s one of Byron’s most meditative and personal poems, and remains one of his more popular poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Expostulation and Reply’ is the ideal poem for a schoolchild to throw back at their teacher, when that teacher accuses them of being idle or not ‘doing anything’ simply because they’re not reading books at that moment.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses Wordsworth’s famous line about poetry and ‘spontaneous overflow’
1798 was the key year for Romantic poetry in Britain, for it saw the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by the two brightest new stars in English verse: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romanticism had well and truly arrived on English shores, and Wordsworth and Coleridge became famous.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Lines Written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’ is a poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) which appeared in his 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, the book he co-authored with his fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although not one of the more famous poems from that collection, it deserves close analysis because it contains a number of prominent themes of Romanticism and Wordsworth’s poetry in particular.