By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘We Are Seven’ is one of the most famous poems by William Wordsworth to appear in the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, the book which he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, after ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘We Are Seven’ is probably Wordsworth’s most widely known and best-loved poem in the collection.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
This week’s poem is a fascinating sonnet, ‘Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex’, written by the little-known female poet who did much to bring the sonnet form back into fashion among English poets and readers.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Mont Blanc’ is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems. ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, to give the poem its full title, is an ode to the mountain, the highest mountain in the Alps, and compares the mountain’s mightiness with the power of the human imagination. This makes it a classic example of a Romantic poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter’ is one of John Clare’s most admired poems, its subject being – as the title makes clear – a heath during the wintry season when its ‘withered brake / Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling’. Before we offer an analysis of this curious and brilliant paean to nature in wintertime, here’s the text of the poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Love’s Philosophy’ is a poem by the second-generation Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The poem was published in December 1819 and is one of Shelley’s most accessible short poems. Nevertheless, a few words of analysis may help to illuminate the poem’s meaning. First, though, here’s the text of the poem.