By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Until now, we’ve largely been concerned with selecting some of the best poems by famous poets – everyone from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, Coleridge to Carol Ann Duffy. But since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, after literary critics like Sir Christopher Ricks had championed Dylan’s poetic song-writing for decades, we’ve begun thinking about music and poetry, songs as well as sonnets.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle contemplates silence, courtesy of Alain Corbin’s new book
I wasn’t intending to write about this book this week. But then on Monday night, I learnt of the death of Mark Hollis, the lead singer of the 1980s and early 1990s band Talk Talk, and I found myself writing about him. So although this isn’t a music blog and this post isn’t about music, as such, I felt I had to write something. Because there are some of us who feel that Mark Hollis was the most outstanding English songwriter and musician of his time, and his death revealed just how many of us there are who hold that view.