Literature

Dear Readers—America, Colonists, Allies, and Ancestors-yet-to-be, We’ve seen that face before, the drape of frost-stiffened hair, the white-rimmed eyes peering out from behind the tanned hide of a humanlike mask, the flitting gaze that settles only when it finds something of true interest—in a mirror. Cruel eyes, a false face and demeanor of ravening hunger

On this episode of Sheltering, Maris Kreizman speaks with Ilana Masad about her new novel, All My Mother’s Lovers. The book centers on a queer woman named Maggie who, after her mother’s sudden death, discovers five sealed envelopes her mother left behind, each to a past lover. Maggie embarks on a road trip to deliver

‘Warning’ is Jenny Joseph’s best-known poem. It’s become one of the best-loved poems among British readers of poetry, but its appeal extends beyond the United Kingdom. What makes ‘Warning’ so continually popular? Before we offer some words of analysis, it’s worth reading the poem: you can find it here. The poem is written in free

‘The Man of the Crowd’ is one of the shorter short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe (who pioneered the short story form when it was still an emerging force in nineteenth-century magazines and periodicals). Written in 1840, the story is deliciously enigmatic and, in some ways, prefigures later fiction, including modernism. You can read

In the beginning was sex. And sex begat skill, and skill (or its absence) begat judgement, and judgement begat insecurity, and insecurity begat doctors’ visits, which begat treatments, which have flourished into a multibillion-dollar industry, so that sex between men and women is today almost inconceiv­able without the shadow of disorder, dysfunction, the “little blue

‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ This couplet is the one truly enduring legacy of the poet and self-described ‘supertramp’, W. H. Davies (1871-1940). There was actually a fair bit more to William Henry Davies than these two lines, but there’s no doubt that they,

Yesterday, around dinnertime, the President of the United States walked from the White House to nearby St. John’s Church for a photo op with a borrowed bible. Several minutes prior to this, police used tear gas and excessive force to clear peaceful protestors from the president’s path—his own constituents, lawfully assembled, removed by state violence.

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication. Before we analyse ‘On Being Asked for

Donald Trump’s autocratic attempt began with a war on words. As with other things he has done, in his attack on language Trump has resembled, or perhaps emulated, 20th-century totalitarian leaders and 21st-century autocrats like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite. In 1984, George Orwell imagined the Party

‘Eternity’s a terrible thought’, as Tom Stoppard famously said. ‘I mean, where’s it all going to end?’ Poets have often dealt with the vast and limitless, the boundless and infinite – whether it’s the concept of the eternal (in time) or the idea of the infinite universe. Or, indeed, the idea of living forever. The

There is a long scene in Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), Toni Cade Bambara’s posthumously published novel about the Atlanta murders of 1979-81, where she describes the 1980 explosion at the Bowen Homes Daycare Center, a nursery in a mostly black community: “See about that guy,” Lafayette said quietly to Speaker, motioning his chin

Thinking and thought loom large in poetry, whether it’s the intellectual exercises of the metaphysical poets, the deep, personal introspection of the Romantics, or the modernists’ interest in subjectivity and interiority. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest introspective poems about thoughts, thinking, and meditation. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’.

The following is excerpted from Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, the story of three unforgettable characters who seek to rise–to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies–and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India and moved

Hamlet is not the only character in Shakespeare’s play who offers us a soliloquy. Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and the murderer of Hamlet’s father (Claudius’ own brother), also gives us a detailed insight into his thoughts, for the first time, in this private moment as he goes to pray in Act III Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s

How many times have you heard someone say, ‘I don’t read poetry. I just don’t get it.’ Or perhaps, ‘Why can’t poets just come out and say what they want to say? Why say something in such a way?’ For many people, poetry is ‘difficult’. But whilst it’s true that poets like John Donne, T.

‘Mending Wall’ is a 1914 poem by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Although it’s one of his most popular, it is also one of his most widely misunderstood – and, like another of his widely anthologised poems, ‘The Road Not Taken’, its most famous lines are often misinterpreted. Before we address these issues of

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a famous phrase derived from Shakespeare The old line about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use. Many of us know, and some may use,

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?’ So begins one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – indeed, perhaps in all of Shakespeare. Before we offer an analysis of this scene – and summarise the meaning of the soliloquy – here is a reminder of