Micheal 
Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Those two lines opened Seamus Heaney’s first major poem and announced a voice that would reshape English-language poetry for the next half century. But the poem that follows, “Digging,” is not really about a pen at all. It is about … Read more
The Romantic poets rebelled against the neoclassical ideals of decorum, hierarchy, reason, and order that had dominated eighteenth-century poetry and thought. In place of these, they embraced the spontaneous, the emotional, the imaginative, and the irrational. This was not a minor stylistic shift. It was a full-scale revolution in how poets understood their art, their … Read more
Ask anyone to name a Charles Dickens character, and you will almost certainly hear a villain before you hear a hero. Fagin. Uriah Heep. Miss Havisham. Bill Sikes. These names carry a weight that Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and even Pip cannot quite match in the cultural imagination. The question of why Charles Dickens villains … Read more