I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a poetry snob. That isn’t to say that I will only read the likes of Dickinson, Shakespeare and Rossetti of course. Indeed, I even dared to venture that Seamus Heaney’s ‘North’ wasn’t a patch on his earlier work of Beowulf. Nor am I a fan of Sylvia Plath, [...]

The World’s Wife To some she’s a feminist hero, but to others, she’s the reincarnated version of a famous German dictator (minus the moustache). You could almost forget she was a poet if, like me, you didn’t study her at school. When someone gave me a free copy of ‘The World’s Wife for World Book’ [...]

After having read Heaney’s translated version of ‘Beowulf‘, my expectations of this poetry collection were rather high. Indeed, the fact that I had to pay £9.99 for less than 70 pages also gave me the notion that some very high-quality work was encased within the covers of this particular paperback. In this review, I’m unfortunately [...]

Genre: Comedy / Loathly Lady Motif Plot Outline: This is a story narrated by one of the Pilgrims from Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. The story itself comes after a long prologue by the narrator, in which she describes her various husbands and her own sensibilities (or arguable lack thereof). The tale itself is about a knight [...]

Genre: Epic / Romance Plot Outline: Two Knights, Arcite and Palamon, are captured by Duke Theseus of Athens. Whilst in prison, Palamon looks out of the window to see Emily in the garden below him and falls instantly in love. His moan of love is heard by Arcite, who then looks out of the window [...]