By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was still in her mid-twenties when she wrote this classic sonnet about male art and the way it uses and depicts women. ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ is a widely (and rightly) praised poem, but a few words of analysis might help to shed light on this canvas.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ is an oddity amongst John Keats’s poetry – indeed, amongst Romantic poetry in general. Just eight lines long – or seven-and-a-half, even – it’s almost a fragment, written in blank verse, almost as if it’s a snippet of spoken dialogue from an unwritten play. (Fittingly, Keats wrote ‘This living hand’ on a manuscript page of one of his unfinished poems.)
A brief overview and summary of Confessio Amantis, John Gower’s medieval poem
The most famous English poem of the entire fourteenth century is Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales, a vast collection of stories borrowed from European medieval and classical sources. But there is another English poem from the fourteenth century, which is also a collection of stories told in verse, which is not as well known as Chaucer’s great work. It was written by Chaucer’s friend and rival poet, John Gower (c. 1330-1408), and its title is Confessio Amantis.
‘So careful of the type?’ A brief summary of Tennyson’s In Memoriam LVI
The so-called ‘dinosaur cantos’ or ‘dinosaur sections’ from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long poem In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) are among the most popular cantos from this elegy for Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, who had died suddenly in 1833. Hallam’s death had a profound effect on the young Tennyson, and close contextual analysis shows that many of his most celebrated poems were inspired, whether directly or indirectly, by this early tragedy. The stanzas below, comprising Canto LVI of In Memoriam, meditate on Tennyson’s personal loss by reflecting on the meaning and impact of the scientific discoveries of the day, and feature his famous description of Nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’:
A short introduction to the children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, in the form of five interesting facts
1. Charlotte’s Web was a huge bestseller. It was the last children’s book to appear on the New York Times bestseller list until the Harry Potter series nearly half a century later. It has gone on to sell an estimated 45 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling children’s novels ever. Indeed, Publishers Weekly have called it the biggest-selling children’s paperback ever published.