Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded as one the best and most influential lyric poets in the English language. Shelley wasn’t famous during his lifetime, but recognition of his poetry grew steadily after his death. He drowned in a storm on the Gulf of Spezia in his sailing boat, just before his 30th birthday. Continue reading Shelley: “To A Skylark”
Alfred Lord Tennyson is one of my favorite poets. I think that “Tears, Idle Tears” is his most moving poem about longing for a past that we can’t recapture, and the melancholy this elicits. Continue reading Analysis of Tennyson’s “Tears Idle Tears”
A portrait of Emily Brontë made by her brother, Branwell Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë (1818 – 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature Continue reading Analysis of Emily Jane Brontë’s Poem “Life”
Innisfree sits in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. Continue reading Analysis of William Butler Yeats: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903)
William Ernest Henley had a difficult life. His family was poor, his father died when he was young, and at age twelve tuberculosis necessitated the amputation of one of his legs below the knee. Continue reading Analysis of William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”