‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (1946) is one of Wallace Stevens’s finest later poems. In just sixteen lines and eight couplets, Stevens summons the quiet and calm of solitary reading inside a house. You can read ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ here before proceeding to our analysis
Literature
June 16, 2020, 1:43pm The brilliant Bernadine Evaristo—a longtime advocate for writers and artists of color whose most recent novel Girl, Woman, Other took home last year’s Booker Prize—appeared on the BBC’s topical debate show Question Time last week to talk about the welcome wave of racist statue removal that’s has been sweeping Britain in recent weeks.
Its title echoing the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is a poem that demonstrates W. H. Auden’s fine ability to fuse irony and wit with pathos and pity. Written in 1939, the poem was one of the first Auden wrote after he moved from Britain to the United States. You can read
From King Arthur to Queen Elizabeth II, monarchs have often been eulogised and discussed in verse down the centuries. Both fictional kings and queens, and very real rulers, have been commemorated (and occasionally mocked) in English poetry since at least the days of Anglo-Saxon verse. In this post, we gather together, and introduce, some of
Traditionally, a ballad was a song that was designed to be danced to, as the etymology of the word, Provençal balada meaning ‘dance, song to dance to’, ultimately from late Latin ballare. The great British ballads – and we say ‘British’ because many of them were Scottish rather than English in origin – date from
June 12, 2020, 10:06am Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library initiative, which made more than 1.3 million books available online for free, will end early as publishers sue for copyright infringement. The nonprofit began offering free books during March as the coronavirus pandemic forced Americans to quarantine in their homes and libraries and schools began to
‘O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem’: so begins the 54th sonnet in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 poems. It’s not the most famous poem in the sequence by any means, and the sentiment it expresses is straightforward – perhaps to the point of being rather slight. But not all sonnets have to tie themselves
TODAY: In 1888, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is born. Dispatches from protests across the country: Su Hwang on why the rebellion had to begin in Minneapolis • From Oakland, Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili explores the activism of black motherhood • Pitchaya Sudbanthad on the shift from pandemic to protest, and finding justice in the streets of Brooklyn. | Lit Hub Politics How JK Rowling betrayed the
‘The sovereign beauty which I do admire, / Witness the world how worthy to be praised’: so begins the third sonnet in Edmund Spenser’s 1595 sonnet sequence Amoretti, written to celebrate his own marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. As love poems to one’s newlywed bride go, it must have made the young Elizabeth
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global
Hope has often been a subject of poetry, as our pick of classic hopeful poems demonstrates. But sometimes the future seems filled less with hope than with fear. What have poets said about fear, about uncertainty for the future, and about being afraid? Below, we introduce ten of our favourite poems about fear and fearfulness.
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic. Today on episode 57 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by art critic Jerry Saltz. What could it look
‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is a phrase from one of John Donne’s most famous pieces of writing. Indeed, it’s the same piece of writing that also includes what is probably his other most famous phrase, ‘No Man Is an Island’. Although they’re often thought to come from a poem Donne wrote, and Donne is
June 12, 2020, 12:09pm Back in the Spring of 2018, having already conquered the worlds of music, film, TV, video gaming, and professional wrestling, 4x NBA champion and basketball’s largest greatest renaissance man Shaquille O’Neal—aka “Shaq” aka “The Diesel” aka “Shaq Fu” aka “The Big Daddy” aka “Superman” aka “The Big Agave” aka “The Big Cactus” aka “The
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a forty-year-old book debunking various widely held beliefs Last year, I reviewed a fascinating book, The dictionary of misinformation , written by a professor of English named Tom Burnam and published in 1975. Although it’s now out of print, you can pick up
June 12, 2020, 10:09am I am all for more silliness in literature, so I was absolutely delighted by the announcement that Hilary Mantel’s forthcoming collection of essays, book reviews, and memoir, which will be published in October by 4th Estate Books and the London Review of Books, has the absolutely legendary title Mantel Pieces. With a few
June 11, 2020, 4:08pm Think you’ve made good use of the COVID lockdown? Is your sourdough starter in decent shape? Did you achieve Inbox Zero? Has your home gym kept you fighting fit? Congratulations! Those are all admirable achievements and certainly nothing to be sneezed at. Sadly, your modest efforts don’t mean shit when measured
‘First Love’ is one of the best-known and best-loved poems by John Clare (1793-1864), who is often forgotten when people are recalling the great English Romantic poets. But as this poem demonstrates, Clare’s poetry is a curious blend of the simple or direct and the complex, and a few words of analysis of ‘First Love’