By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) is widely seen as the progenitor of the literary movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, along with Langston Hughes, McKay is perhaps the poet who did more than any other to raise the profile of this group of African American writers, artists, and musicians working in New York in the 1920s.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Colossus’ is a transitional Sylvia Plath poem. The title poem of the only poetry collection published during her lifetime (The Colossus, in 1960), it is one of the most accomplished poems in that collection, and in some ways paves the way for the mature poems, written in Plath’s distinctive voice, which she wrote from 1960 onwards.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) is one of the greatest names in Palestinian literature. After publishing his first poetry collecting, Wingless Birds, when he was just 19 years old, Darwish went on to forge a formidable literary reputation.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Hawk Roosting’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems by the English poet Ted Hughes (1930-98). Published in his second collection Lupercal in 1960, the poem is unusual in that it is spoken by the hawk itself. This bird of prey asserts its dominion over the whole of the natural world, making no apologies for its predatory acts of hunting and killing other living things.