‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’; ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus’. In just over half a dozen lines, Cassius gives us two of the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. His ‘bestride the narrow world […]
In January 2021, the 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman achieved a record: she became the youngest person ever to recite a poem at a US President’s inauguration, when Gorman read her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The poem is hopeful while being realistic about […]
In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can […]