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.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Hamlet’s famous quotation ‘A little more than kin …’
‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ is a famous quotation from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. But as ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’ is a famous and memorable line in a play that is packed with famous and memorable lines – as the old quip has it, there are too many quotations in it – it might be worth spending some time analysing the cleverness of this particular one, since this line comprises the very first words Hamlet speaks to his uncle, Claudius.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of Orwell’s famous six-word slogan, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’
The six-word sentence ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ is one of the two widely known lines from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm – the other being ‘all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s famous opening words to his greatest poem
‘April is the cruellest month’ is the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. There are, actually, two things I could say in response to the statement I’ve just typed. One of them is that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the opening line of The Waste Land (all will be explained in a moment).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning – and literary origins – of a well-known phrase
‘All that glitters is not gold’. Who gave us that famous expression? William Shakespeare? Thomas Gray? That prolific but elusive author, ‘Anon’?