Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark

By Edward Wakeling

In 1876 Lewis Carroll published by far his longest poem - a fantastical epic tale recounting the adventures of a bizarre troupe of nine tradesmen and a beaver. Carrollian scholar, Edward Wakeling, introduces The Hunting of the Snark. more

Robert Southey’s Dreams Revisited

By W.A. Speck

As well as being poet laureate for 30 years and a prolific writer of letters, Robert Southey was an avid recorder of his dreams. W.A. Speck, author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, explores the poet's dream diary and the importance of dreams in his work. more

An 18th-Century Genius in Bondage: The Poems and Politics of Phillis Wheatley

By Vincent Carretta

Transported as a slave from West Africa to America when just a child, Phillis Wheatley published in 1773, at the age of twenty, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Vincent Carretta takes a look at the remarkable life of the first ever African-American woman to be published. more

The Krakatoa Sunsets

By Richard Hamblyn

When a volcano erupted on a small island in Indonesia in 1883, the evening skies of the world glowed for months with strange colours. Richard Hamblyn explores a little-known series of letters that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins sent in to the journal Nature describing the phenomenon - letters that would constitute the majority of the small handful of writings published while he was alive. more

The Strangely Troubled Life of Digby Mackworth Dolben

By Carl Miller

In 1911 the soon-to-be poet laureate Robert Bridges published the poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend who had drowned to death at the age of 19 almost half a century earlier. Carl Miller looks at Bridges' lengthy introduction in which he tells of the short and tragic life of the boy with whom fellow poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was reportedly besotted. more

Encounter at the Crossroads of Europe - the Fellowship of Zweig and Verhaeren

By Will Stone

Stefan Zweig, whose works passed into the public domain this year in many countries around the world, was one of the most famous writers of the 1920s and 30s. Will Stone explores the importance of the Austrian's early friendship with the oft overlooked Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. more

Wild Heart Turning White: Georg Trakl and Cocaine

By Richard Millington

To mark the 100th anniversary of the death by cocaine overdose of Austrian lyric poet Georg Trakl, Richard Millington explores the role the drug played in Trakl's life and works. more

The Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson

By Mike Kelly

AMHERST COLLEGE - Mike Kelly explores highlights from their Emily Dickinson collection, a huge variety of manuscript forms - from concert programmes to chocolate wrappers - which give us a fascinating insight into how the poet worked. more

The Sound and the Story: Exploring the World of Paradise Lost

By Philip Pullman

John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author Philip Pullman considers the sonic beauty and expert storytelling of Milton’s masterpiece and the influence it has had on his own work. more

Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword

By Roddy Howland Jackson

Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids. more